Expert systems are basically decision trees which are "gofai" (good old fashioned ai) as opposed to deep learning. I've never really seen a good definition for what counts as "gofai" (is all statistical learning/regression gofai? What about regression done via gradient descent?). There's some talk in [1]

[1] https://www.beren.io/2023-04-10-Why-GOFAI-failed/

Yes: you fit a decision tree to your dataset in an automated fashion, that fits the definition of machine learning. Just as you would use backpropagation to fit a neural network to your data.

This is what I learnt at university some decades ago, and it matches what wikipedia says today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree_learning