is it possible to write a conceptual ML paper?

With Schölkopf (MPI-IS) and Villar (JHU) and others I am trying to write a conceptual paper about the structure of machine-learning methods. Physicists love conceptual papers! But the ML literature is all about performance of implemented methods. That makes it hard to write a conceptual paper. Referees expect to see performance that beats SOTA on some problem (at least a toy problem). I'm struggling.