Your take might be honest, but it's clearly uninformed.
Everyone has been wrong about how ai developed.
It's worth giving "The Bitter Lesson" a read [1] if you haven't yet.
[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
That being said, architectures are also important when they can reduce computational complexity by orders of magnitude.