I guess my point is that there is a tendency to say "evolution chose to make this because that's the optimal solution", where actually evolution may have "missed" the optimal solution.
But evolution is not an active process (of something choosing what's optimal), but a passive process (it does change, and some of those (random) changes win).
Or am I missing something?
In general it's unsurprising that selection misses hypothetical universal optima for the same reason it's unsurprising we didn't evolve wings even though that'd be an optimal way to escape lions. Evolution moves traits around fitness landscapes heavily contrained by exaptation. But interestingly many highly conserved mechanisms, e.g. essential cell machinery or metabolic pathways shared widely across the tree of life, have been shown to be maintained at absolute energetic and informational optima.
Now, but it's not clear at all how it will evolve in the fairly near future :-).
But I generally agree with your point on evolution: it is a random process. We tend to "personify" it ("evolution chose to make us like this"), but that's wrong: species that evolved to being less fit died, those that evolved to be more fit survived. Pure chance.