Well, matlab didn't pivot into that esoteric toolbox of numerical methods for engineering tasks. It has always been that. That's probably the very reason ML researchers picked it up in the first place, because everyone was using it already anyway for scientific (esp. linear algebra) calculations.

I've done my degree a bit before you (in Electrical Engineering, also learned all I could about NN and other AI methods back then) and most people would use MATLAB for whatever scientific algorithms/calculation they needed to do. We had free student licences at the university so that we could use it for lab work and for our theses. I remember it had all kinds of numerical optimization algorithms/packages, control theory algorithms, etc.