People can get enjoyment from doing (and watching) people doing things, even if machines can do it better.
Amateur running seems to make more sense.
Someone once commented that men make extraordinary efforts to impress women, yet in general have very little understanding of what women actually like. This explains jacked-up trucks, professional chess, professional running, etc
EDIT: I'm talking about professional-level running or chess, not the hobbies of running or chess
We humans get a lot of satisfaction of improving and competing in all sorts of activities.
The world is so big that for any activity you'll find a good deal of people obsessed with that activity, and making it their life's work to perfect it.
While that is undoubtedly true, I suspect no one becomes a professional chess player for the ladies.
They do it because they like, they're good at it, and they (if good enough) can make a living with it.
You are seriously suggesting that people go pro in X/Y/Z mostly because they want to impress girls? Oo
...although a novice can beat a civil engineer at bridge design games. :-)
See Real Civil Engineer's YouTube channel [1], where a real civil engineer plays various engineering and puzzle games, including a lot of Poly Bridge 2 and 3. In Poly Bridge after finishing a level he generally looks at the leaderboard to see how the people that beat him did. There's usually a bunch that used cheesy methods, but there are also often several where they actually just did a better design. Especially on levels where hydraulics are used to move parts of the bridge.
A novice wouldn't be assisted by the engine but rather be an engine-chessboard interface with no real input as far as the game goes. I think that's a really weird take. You wouldn't claim there's no point in 5000m race when any person with a car easily beats you.
Running ability is useful in real life outside of races.
Very high chess skill is never useful in any environment outside of the artificially restricted game environment.
All life comes down to is fulfillment. And chess, for many, is one of the most absurdly fulfilling and satisfying things that there is. And what makes the game so special is that as you become better at it, it becomes even more fulfilling and satisfying. And there's no real limit to how much you can improve. And the cost of it is practically $0. And so all a pro is, is somebody who takes their fulfillment of the game to an arguably natural extreme.
Any novice can beat you when in a car.
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EDIT: With all due respect, your comments sounds exactly that silly.
Cheating in chess is maybe something closer to steroids in athletics. If you take an average Joe and gear him up with all the steroids in the world, he's not suddenly going to just hulk out and become a world class athlete, contrary to what many think. But if you take a world class athlete and gear him up, he is going to be able to use that gain a substantial and unfair advantage over his clean peers.
Maybe for Title Tuesday IDK, but not for most competitive chess.
I think the solution is human augmentation to stay relevant.
Or we just have silly things like weight classes for each achievement.