While you are right, that deep understanding of machine learning require graduate level mathematics, however I see the trend where big companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are trying to democratize AI and machine learning. Soon you will have people using machine learning tools and algorithms without understanding the underlying math.

Given the nature of machine learning, even if you understand the mathematics behind it, you cannot "reason" with a trained-model. I think now academia is catching up in this democratization effort, by producing engineers that can use those machine learning tools (even if they cannot design such tools/frameworks)