MuZero is in some sense the proto-holy grail, in that it implements learning and planning into unstructured tasks over purely internal models. While there is an obvious chasm between it and the end point, this is still something that has only recently become more than an abstract goal, at least to any effect.

Being able to perform planning over ‘simple’ domains like Atari games and Go (and not even in the same trained model!) might not seem very comparable to the real thing, but evolutionary history spent the bulk of its time building up the basics—most animals fail most cognitive tasks—so I don't think this is indicative of the progress being misguided, especially given networks-on-GPUs is literally a 10 year old field.

I think MuZero is a clear example of building by principles over random flailing. I get why there does also seem to be the latter, but it's certainly not the whole of it, and anyhow it worked for evolution ;P.