I recently attended a PhD thesis defence in which one committee members claimed that "manual feature extraction is outdated. Nowadays, we have [deep] machine learning models doing that job for us automatically."

Is this statement true? If yes, please provide a reference substantiating this claim.

**Edit:** Apparently, there seem to be different answers depending on the data type. Thus, please let me know about any references substantiating your claims for images, time series, etc... separately.