Deep learning-based recommendation models are very popular in industry. Not sure what “proof” you’re referring to, but it’s definitely not the case that random forests outperform DL based approaches in general.
I did a bit of deeper dive here, and the evidence remains mixed, but definitely generally in favor of random forests for recommendation.
My two cents: Most recommendation engines are far from perfect, and the customer is too often left scratching their heads. Given this, why bear the orders of magnitude more expense to go with with a deep learning solution?
