Earlier quoted context omitted.
"traditional approaches" in CV & NLP were also ML (a quick reminder that machine learning existed long before the deep learning hype). Not sure what the parent meant by "algorithmic approach" though.
yes, but before the ML step the old approaches relied on expert-crafted features. The breakthroughs in those fields via deep-learning is because people found architectures (CNN/RNNs) that could learn those features much, much, much more efficiently than they could be hand-crafted.
Well, if you tune the hyperparameters and architecture just so....