I agree. It is difficult to convince leadership to do this work at all ("it works on my example, ship it"), and in my experience most DS don't even want to do it.

One of the key value is that it forces some thinking about what is the task you want to solve in the first place. In many cases, it is difficult if not impossible to do it, which implies the underlying product should not be built at all. But nobody wants to hear that.

Doing eval only makes sense if making the product better impacts something the business cares about, which is very difficult to do in practice.