I think you're quite right about that which is not to say Bayes can't be very useful but I do agree that it has been elevated to the level of religion.

Yeah. Further context, for other readers: it's important to distinguish between Bayesianism the intellectual movement and Bayesian modeling as it exists in the professional and academic statistical community.

There are communities which pick up Bayes Theorem in isolation (i.e. without any other statistical education or knowledge) and apply it to every debate and discussion under the Sun, often pontificating about how rational they're being about "updating their priors." But using Bayes theorem qualitatively instead of quantitatively - and without regard for its pitfalls - often leads to confirmation bias in which someone lends a veneer of rigorous probability to something they already unconsciously believed anyway. It's also sometimes used to dress up pseudoscience with intellectual polish, and it takes work to unpack those errors.

Bayesian probability is not a panacea, and does not displace frequentist probability. The two paradigms are fully compatible (you can move from one to the other via inversion of the estimator function). But they answer different questions, both of which are important. It is also easy to make statistical errors in both paradigms.

This.

I am confused by the criticisms "a superimposed set of abstractions. Nothing more." and "nothing to do with its processes". Surely that is exactly what this kind of framework attempts to achieve? ie ways of abstracting to make better decisions when the problem is too complex or soft for process-level understanding.

I think the op is saying, unlike its often presented, by learning Bayes youre not "discovering the truth about how to update beliefs from data". I.e. its not a panacea, its a framework with strengths and weaknesses.

Recall, most statisticians are not Bayesian. Most science is not Bayesian and its not because everyone is naive or just too stupid to see. The Bayesian approach is well known and long standing but it takes using it in anger to see what it is good for and what it is not.