Pushback on my machine learning paper from non-ML critics, not sure how to interpret it [R]

Excerpt

Hi everyone. For context, I work as a predictive modeling researcher, and my background is in computer science. I do not have an extensive background in statistics, epidemiology, association analysis, or related areas. I was tasked with developing a predictive model for a specific disease using survey variables as well as body measurements such as BMI, neck circumference, waist circumference, hip circumference, and similar variables. When I approached the project, my plan was to develop a model