"Statistical computing" is kinda outdated and stems from misunderstanding what ML is and the past reliance on some well-known statistical methods. Look at it as a parallelizable non-linear optimization able to reduce dimensionality by employing cool tricks and surprisingly efficient in some real-world tasks. If you just take a general, fully-connected DNN, it wouldn't work at all; those tricks like CNN/RNN/LSTM/GAN make it all work within a narrow setup of hyperparameters.