I won’t pretend that its popularity is in any way proportional to its quality, but I enjoyed it and so did many others so she must have done something right. Calling a work that many people enjoy trash just sounds a bit elitist to me.
Feel free to call the author whatever you want though, at this point I’ve no respect left for her.
And at this point it’s also code for ‘machine learning’.
Which really is just fancy statistics. Sometimes it’s barely more advanced than plain regression.