I think most people agree in the deep learning community that ways to understand NN's are useful, if for nothing other than debugging, but I don't think the community agrees at all over whether explainability is necessary to use it. In many cases, it depends on the context. For self driving cars, most companies only use neural networks for components of the cars and an explainable algorithm on top of that that interp…
I have to be able to debug anything I work with; debugging is necessary.
>> "the neural network parsing the LIDAR did not classify the stop sign correctly, so the driving algorithm did not stop"
It's important to look into why the stop sign was mis-classified, even if the classifier is a subcomponent.