I was not at all a fan of "The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can", but this misses the same thing that it missed.

The Bitter Lesson is from the perspective of how to spend your entire career. It is correct over the course of a very long time, and bakes in Moore's Law.

The Bitter Lesson is true because general methods capture these assumed hardware gains that specific methods may not. It was never meant for contrasting methods at a specific moment in time. At a specific moment in time you're just describing Explore vs Exploit.