The bitter lesson is the opposite. It argues that hand-crafted heuristics will eventually get beaten by more general learning algorithms that can take advantage of computing power.
Indeed, even in "classical chess engines" like Stockfish which previously required handcrafted heuristics at leaf nodes, in recent years the NNUE [1] [2] has greatly outperformed it. Note that this is a completely different approach from the one that AlphaZero takes, and modern Stockfish is significantly stronger than AlphaZero.
Brute forcing is bound to find paths beyond heuristics. What I'm getting at is that the path needs to be established first before it can be beaten. Hence why I'm wondering if one isn't an extension of the other instead of an opposing strategy.
I.e. search and heuristics both have a time and place, not so much a bitter lesson but a common filter for a next iteration to pass through.
