Are there machine learning subfields that are becoming irrelevant (or is irrelevant)? [D]

Excerpt

I was reading a paper that surveyed the field of neural architecture search , where it said within 5 years, around 3000+ new models were proposed. The amount of compute and resources spent on this is absolutely astronomical. However, the transformer was notably not one of the models that was found through NAS and then the field of NAS just quietly went away afterwards. In my mind this really raises question if any research in NAS should be continued. Then I recently found a talk by Nicholas Carl