It feels different to me from the CS side - this paper in particular feels likely to open up new research instead of closing it off, and I find that really exciting and a worthwhile use of AI. Showing that there's a (completely impractical but who's counting) algorithm better than the previously hypothesized lower bounds seems like the kind of thing that will inspire a scramble to keep beating it (and figure out the true lower bound). I give this one a thumbs up.

Yeah but at least IMO TCS has little to do with real world optimization. Real world optimization uses the easiest possible algorithms with very simple ideas like min-cut flows.