As a game developer for a grid based puzzle game (https://thinky.gg - one of the games Pathology is a game where you have to go from Point A to Point B in shortest amount of steps).

I have found A* fascinating not because of the optimization but also from the various heuristics that can be built on top of it make it more generalized for other types of pathfinding.

Some devs have built solvers that use techniques like bidirectional search, precomputed pattern databases, and dead locking detection.