I generally agree, though direction, intuition, and domain knowledge are still relevant. Your breadth-first-search framing feels right, but you still need a sense of which paths are worth following, and you need to know when to trust the results.

I’ve been doing more math as a hobby in the past few weeks — working on lesser-known conjectures and exploring proofs of hard theorems — than I could have managed over the previous several years. It’s an exciting time.