Agreed. Many state of the art control strategies nowadays are based on optimization techniques (e.g. Model Predictive Control, MPC, optimizes a convex cost function of the state, setpoint and input to your system over a certain time horizon). This has become a viable control strategy for fast (>1kHz) processes only in the past 15 years, since the optimization can be computationally intensive.

Or be able to derive them. PID was never explicitly taught on my course, but all the theory behind it was.