Since then it's dominated both classical engines and purely NN engines, which tells us that human expert knowledge still counts for something here.
Nah. The Stockfish Improvements comes from NNUE Evaluation which roughly speaking replaces the mostly hand crafted evaluation function by experts with one by a a NN. So it actually says the opposite of what you claimed.
Stockfish+NNUE is better than leelazero because the search part of Leelazero is not subject to reinforcement learning. That part is where Stock fish (admittedly hand expert coded) is better.
Nah. The Stockfish Improvements comes from NNUE Evaluation which roughly speaking replaces the mostly hand crafted evaluation function by experts with one by a a NN. So it actually says the opposite of what you claimed.
Stockfish+NNUE is better than leelazero because the search part of Leelazero is not subject to reinforcement learning. That part is where Stock fish (admittedly hand expert coded) is better.