This was/is basically a strawman though. Like maybe "human input winning" was desirable for chess masters but for computer science wonks? Not the point or the disappoint. It's always neats and scruffies fighting about using some kind of recognizable method (logic) instead of magic (ML).
> breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning.
More to OP's point I think: nowadays when someone wants to beat you over the head with the bitter lesson, they aren't as careful to include learning and search. They want to say learning leads to intuition (magic) whereby we can avoid work (logic/search), and maybe argue or assume from there that neats and scruffies is settled. TBF, something like reasoning in latent space does resemble intuition!
But the real lesson is confirmed every time we bother to check, and not very bitter for anyone. Search/learning/logic are ALL always necessary on any sufficiently difficult problems, and hybrids that interleave always outperform everything else. Stockfish being the example in this thread that different camps of absolutists would like to claim, but also all the MCTS examples, evolving examples, and new hybrids all the time. My favorite lately: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08983