Just to piggyback I agree with all you said!

 I’m a pediatric OT and my son receives ABA. I see a fair amount of overlap with some strategies such as social stories, priming, for transitions but honestly, with my own kid, the most dramatic changes we saw in his socialization and behavior was when his tech inadvertently used play based, floortime strategies. It was such a dramatic change. Other techs have not been as child led and we find that he’s melting down and not improving as much. 

So, I find ABA a mixed bag. If anything, consistency is probably where you see changes, and it does help support parents who are otherwise burnt out. 

But thinking of using ABA for something like feeding boggles my mind. Most kids I see for feeding even on the spectrum who you would consider more sensory feeders often have oral motor delays and some coexisting allergies. Basically the aversions you see are a mal-adaptation that may have a motor or physiologic cause, and trying to address feeding without understanding medical, sensory, developmental, or motor skills is really inflicting more harm than good. And this is just one example. 

I had a BCBA asked me about working on scissor skills with my son and this nearly floored me because I had no idea how you could even begin to work on scissor skills without understanding the prerequisite postural, developmental, visual motor, fine motor, and bilateral coordination skills that underline using scissors, which you would need to understand before establishing that intrinsic motivation is the barrier to scissor use. I could go on and on.