It's entirely true that these are combinations that humans haven't (and probably wouldn't) come up with.

I don't want to underplay this. "It's similar to hyperparameter search" makes it sound like it isn't interesting or novel, which is untrue. I completely believe it is a revolutionary way to build software (so much so that I quit my job, raised funding and are working on a similar space of problems).

But it isn't doing something like inventing a new math operations similar to the other operators which humans put together to form cells/layers. It is rearranging and choosing those operators in new ways.