engineering vs. science -> scientist-types find such hacks ugly whereas engineers have to pay bills and get things moving fast.
AlphaZero vs Stockfish wasn’t some outgrowth of existing methods. They basically throw the old style away and started over.
Object recognition, LLM’s etc all involved throwing what used to be unimaginable levels of data and compute at a problem that “suddenly” worked. Not saying the people at OpenAI aren’t clever, but instead that it wouldn’t have worked in 2000.