"The bitter lesson" didn't merely claim that a sufficiently large amount of compute would obsolete an engineered solution. Its claim was far stronger: the time

"The bitter lesson" didn't merely claim that a sufficiently large amount of compute would obsolete an engineered solution. Its claim was far stronger: the time it takes for the compute growth to catch up with the hand-engineered solution is so short that the investment in the latter won't pay off in the sense of a researcher's personal career investment, or in the sense of a big-tech R&D effort ROI. You may well dispute such a claim, of course. Would be interesting to read your thoughts if you are willing to share them.