Agreed. Sometimes theoretical analysis doesn't transfer to the real world. And sometimes it is also valuable to see a complete system. Because the whole training process is important.

However, since my days in academia are over, I am much less interested in getting the next 0.5% of performance out of some benchmark dataset. In industry you are way more interested in a well-working solution that you can produce quickly instead of the best-performing solution. So, I am way more interested in a tool set of ideas that generally work well and ideally a knowledge of what the limitations are.

And yes, while papers about applications can provide practical validation of these ideas, very few of these papers conduct proper ablation studies. And in most cases it is also too much to ask. Pretty much any application is a complex system with an elaborate pre-processing and training procedure. You cannot practically evaluate the influence of every single step and parameter. You just twiddle around with the parameters you deem to be most important and that is your ablation study.