NNs only ended up working (at the level of human performance) because of 60+years of research punctuated by periods of very little interest (including times when GP/GA were being explored widely in the literature). And a bunch of that research was in entirely different areas, like GPUs, which went through many cycles of refinement for gaming and HPC before the DL people recognized its utility.

To achieve parity, GPs and GAs would need demonstrations on the level of what was seen about 10 years ago in NNs, then enough people would get involved to start doing more tech dev to make the hardware do GAs really, really, really fast.