[D] Any other PhD students feel underprepared and that the bar is too low?

Hello! I started my PhD a year and a half ago, and I feel like when I did everyone was kind of dismissive of how much/little theoretical knowledge I have or am missing.

Now that I’ve been here a year I can say with confidence that I didn’t have enough theory, and am constantly scrambling to acquire it.

This isn’t like an imposter syndrome rant, I think that this is quite common in ML academia, I just don’t know what to do with that reality, and wonder what folks on here think.

Like why is it that despite citing the universal approximation theorem, and spending all our time working on applying it, so few of us can actually follow its proof?