>My point is that "more data" here simply represents the mental effort that has already been exerted in pre-AI/DL era, which we're now capitalizing on while we can

Not really. It's not simply that modern architectures are not adding additional inductive biases, they are actively throwing away the inductive bias that used to be used by everyone. For example, it was taken for granted that you should use CNNs to give you translation invariance, but apparently now visual transformers can match that performance with the same amount of compute.