A mathematician in the 70s said, “hey what if this is how brains work?”

If you really want to be pedantic, the modern concept of neural networks was invented decades prior.

But in either case, ANN do follow the basic concept of how neurons work. That’s not even up for debate. Obviously biological neurons have way more going on, and there’s even evidence for “warm” quantum processing happening within each neuron in the microtubules. But the feed-forward signal mechanism is real, and ANNs are based on that concept.

Except the Neural Net model doesn’t actually reproduce everything real, living neurons do.

No idea what you’re saying here. But if I had to guess, you’re saying that “real brains, not artificial ones, create novel outputs”. And if that is what you meant, then congrats, you said nothing of value. The discussion was never about biological vs artificial neural network quality.