I think the bitter lesson has a lot more to do with the physical limits of von neumann computation and the structure of computing as we currently understand it than the direction that AI research should go.

That the emergent deep learning truthers are on the ascent should not be an excuse to completely discount knowledge based approaches. We're currently grappling with a number of limitations in the latest generation of ML models, particularly surrounding the cost of computation required to train and run them, and the fact that they have absolutely no way to verify the quality or correctness of their output. Clearly there are drawbacks to relying on a system we barely understand to produce our programs for us.