For those interested in a great read on why causality really does matter, give "The Book of Why" a read. I'm not convinced Judea Pearl's modeling approach is the most rigorous, but it does a clear and convincing job putting causality (esp. w/ data fusion!) at the heart of modern systems (including ML).

For those on a more mathematical bend, check out "Causality" by the same author or "Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences" by Imbens and Rubin