My counterclaim would be that doing ML in code is actually easier these days than doing stuff in Excel (and a 1080 is sufficient). So why not solve the problem with a sufficiently easy to use tool?
Your other point is valid. If it can be solved deterministically than you should probably do that (but I'd probably not reach for C since I don't need the C-efficiency hammer right away)
Because it's likely that when solving things in Excel, you actually know what you're doing. The popular ML approach these days is throwing data at whatever you downloaded from Kaggle and hoping it sticks.
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