> There is a notion of success ... which I think is novel in the history of science. It interprets success as approximating unanalyzed data.

Yes! Yes! Yes! As I've been arguing for years, we've already plucked the low-hanging fruit of science. The vast majority of additional progress will have to be made by using what are essentially black box models, and the proof of a good model will be how well it approximates new data, not how nice the mathematical equation looks or how well it can be explained intuitively.