The subfield is oversupplied with labor relative to the supply of good ideas worth working on for six years and advising capacity.
It's trendy, and in general it's best to avoid trendy fields.
But if you actually care about ML -- I think it's one of the best things in the world -- go for it! ML has never been more accessible.
Trendy fields often have lots of money in them in both the short term(grants, associateships, funding), and the medium term(first job prospects) as well as benefits like preferential appearance in journals(if two equally insightful articles are up for one spot, would you rather take the article on the topic many are interested in or the article from a much more niche area?) and possibly more low-hanging fruit since there is so much more work to piggyback on/respond to/extend.
because the very best machine learning models are distilled from postdoc tears.
I think every significant model has come from industry. us postdocs just tweak hyperparameters and publish answers to questions about them that no one is ever likely to ask
It's like the "will it blend" series, but for machine learning