Yes, more generally this entails looking at the numbers learned by a model not as singular "weights" (which doesn't scale as the model gets larger) but more as a way of approximating a non-parametric representation (i.e. something function-like or perhaps even more general). There's a well-established field of variously "explainable" semi-parametric and non-parametric modeling and statistics, which aims to seamlessly scale to large volumes of data and modeling complexity much like NN's do.