>> Sadly though, whoever is working on serious hybrid systems will probably not be very popular in either of the rather extremist communities for pure logic or pure ML.

That is not true. I work in logic-based AI (a form of machine learning where everything, examples, learned models, and inductive bias, is represented as logic programs). I am not against hybrid systems and the conference of my field, the International Joint Conferences of Learning and Reasoning included NeSy the International Conference on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (and will again, from next year, I believe). Statistical machine learning approaches and hybrid approaches are widespread in the literature of classical, symbolic AI, such as the literature on Automated Planning and Reasoning, and you need only take a look at the big symbolic conferences like AAAI, IJCAI, ICAPS (planning) and so on to see that there is a substantial fraction of papers on either purely statistical, or neuro-symbolic approaches.

But try going the other way and searching for symbolic approaches in the big statistical machine learning conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR. You may find the occasional paper from the Statistical Relational Learning community but that's basically it. So the fanaticism only goes one way: the symbolicists have learned the lessons of the past and have embraced what works, for the sake of making things, well, work. It's the statistical AI folks who are clinging on to doctrine, and my guess is they will continue to do so, while their compute budgets hold. After that, we'll see.

What's more, the majority of symbolicists have a background in statistical techniques- I for example, did my MSc in data science and let me tell you, there was hardly any symbolic AI in my course. But ask a Neural Net researcher to explain to you the difference between, oh, I don't know, DFS with backtracking and BFS with loop detection, without searching or asking an LLM. Or, I don't know, let them ask an LLM and watch what happens.

Now, that is a problem. The statistical machine learning field has taken it upon itself in recent years to solve reasoning, I guess, with Neural Nets. That's a fine ambition to have except that reasoning is already solved. At best, Neural Nets can do approximate reasoning, with caveats. In a fantasy world, which doesn't exist, one could re-discover sound and complete search algorithms and efficient heuristics with a big enough neural net trained on a large enough dataset of search problems. But, why? Neural Nets researchers could save themselves another 30 years of reinventing a wheel, or inventing a square wheel that only rolls on Tuesdays, if they picked up a textbook on basic Computer Science or AI (Say, Russel and Norvig, that it seems some substantial minority think as a failure because it didn't anticipate neural net breakthroughs 10 years later).

AI has a long history. Symbolicists know it, because they, or their PhD advisors, were there when it was being written and they have the facial injuries to prove it from falling down all the possible holes. But, what happens when one does not know the history of their own field of research?

In any case, don't blame symbolicists. We know what the statisticians do. It's them who don't know what we've done.