It's more about the attribute that a certain task radiates. Cars have a greater velocity, humans don't seem to care very much, other animals achieve such a feat, too. On the other hand, Go and Chess radiate an aura of intellectual prowess, if you were someone who spent his entire life playing a board game, just to be curb stomped by something coming out of thin air, your pride would falter. And that is basically what it's all about. Pride.

Professional Chess is going along fine 20+ years after DeepBlue achievement, Kasparov hardly retired after that because "AI" could do better.

While Alpha's success was a surprise at the time, it was always known that it was just a matter of time before there was a unbeatable engine.

Achievements as a human has not diminished because a machine can do it better. Body building, weightlifting , running or shooting or pretty much any sport really as has not diminished despite there being better machines and even other biological species which can do better than us.

Every sport has classes for competition, male/female, seniors, under-XX, heavy weight etc. Serena loosing badly against 203rd ranked smoking male player ( albeit at 16th not yet at her peak ) did not reduce her pride in her game or reduces her achievements in anyway.

My point merely is, that humans seem to think to have a monopole on intellectual superiority. If you were to call someone else stupid, there's a high probability they'd feel the urge to punch you in the face, unless that person is already apathetic in nature. And to my perception, slightly superior intelligence seems to be the only thing we humans have going for us. Speed, Strength? such attributes have become terribly trivial.

For a closer analogy, chess engines have 1000+ elo points on the top grandmasters, and professional chess has never been more popular.

Sure. And instead of writing code ("running") you can operate Codex ("drive the car"). Instead of being a runner, you'll be a driver. And gradually the car will drive itself, and you can sit and watch.