Goalpost for usefulness of HRAD work

There's a pattern I see where:

• people advocating HRAD research bring up historical cases like Turing, Shannon, etc. where formalization worked well
• people arguing against HRAD research talk about how "complete axiomatic descriptions" haven't been useful so far in AI, and how they aren't used to describe machine learning systems

It seems like there's a question of what is the relevant goalpost, for deciding whether HRAD work is useful.