Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI).

Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.

I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.