It feels goalpost-movey to downplay exploring a large search space efficiently in regards to "intelligence". If we dug into a human genius's brain and found it was somehow trying out a million ways to solve a a problem at once, no one would seriously suggest the person isn't actually intelligent.

And our brains must something like that at some physical level. You can't have a "turtles all the way down" of reasoning - the building blocks must be simpler. It must reduce to something like pathfinding and brute force at some point, weighted by factors in the system and maybe some randomness.

We have a romantic view of intelligence, perhaps stemming from intuition within the context of scientific discovery. Given enough intelligence, and enough context, a brilliant person can have a stroke of inspiration that allows them to make a major leap (a-la General Relativity or Fermats last theorem). We haven't seen THAT same capacity from a machine, but we see the more ordinary, unsexy grinding type of progress that represents 99.9% of scientific reality.