Tbf OP said they have the tools to understand what was going on, not that they could build a model to compete with OpenAI tomorrow. EE (especifically DSP and communications) uses a lot of the same building blocks as ML so yes it does prepare you.
You are right in that the emergent abilities come from humongous amounts of training data and compute which only a handful of companies (and the people working in them) deal with today. I'm sure there's a lot of secret gotchas which only arise at a certain scale so one cannot self-study for them. Companies also guard these wherever possible because of economic incentives. But that applies to most other engineering disciplines. You can take a course in civil engineering and have enough knowledge to reason about why a skyscraper will not fall apart in the wind; doesn't mean you have the ability to build one.
You are right in that the emergent abilities come from humongous amounts of training data and compute which only a handful of companies (and the people working in them) deal with today. I'm sure there's a lot of secret gotchas which only arise at a certain scale so one cannot self-study for them. Companies also guard these wherever possible because of economic incentives. But that applies to most other engineering disciplines. You can take a course in civil engineering and have enough knowledge to reason about why a skyscraper will not fall apart in the wind; doesn't mean you have the ability to build one.