You are definitely right about the evaluation; I switched between several streams and I don't think there was anyone saying that they didn't prefer white after

You are definitely right about the evaluation; I switched between several streams and I don't think there was anyone saying that they didn't prefer white after around move 39, despite a 0.0 eval for a lot of those positions. But part of the reason the eval is misleading is because it might be reflecting a sequence of "only moves" - where only one move can hold that evaluation and it may be very hard to find some of those moves for black, while white has lots of good moves in each position. While that is a problem with human interpretation of eval, I do not see how it invalidates use of ACPL which is an average across the entire game.