perhaps because you are interested in optimizations or distillation or something

Yes, my job is model compression: quantization, pruning, factorization, ops fusion/approximation/caching, in the context of hw/sw codesign.

In general, I agree with you that simple intuitions often break down in DL - I observed it many times. I also agree that we don't have good understanding how these systems work. Hopefully this situation is more like pre-Newtonian physics, and Newtons are coming.