I kind of wonder if the reason this seems to be true is that emergent systems are just able to go a lot farther into much more complex design spaces than any system a human mind is capable of constructing.
I think this is overly general. A more accurate statement is that, on tasks where we don't actually understand how something works in precise detail, it's more effective to just throw compute at it until a system with "innate" understanding emerges. But if you do actually know how something works (rather than vague models with no clear supporting evidence), it's still more effective to engineer the system specifically based on that knowledge.
