Damn did you just use the term "RetCon" for...basic literary analysis about a book written in the late 1970's/early 80's on a literal typewriter? By the man who literally coined the term "The Web" in the way we now use it for the internet, in what many consider to be the first Cyberpunk novel?
You just wrote a novel when "I don't understand that I'm calling the book that established the tropes I now think of as common as being chocked full of tropes" would have sufficed
By the by, I'm an SWE who's run a ML homelab for 10 years at this point. You're trying really hard to conflate the economic incentives of the frontier labs with the fundamental technical limitations of the technology that push towards swarm-level fan outs while searching and planning. No buisness would ever pay 10$mil in raw compute to brute force a problem, because it's an insane economic proposition. These labs are doing it half as marketing and half because they're research institutions masquerading as businesses because...earnestly a lot of them probably did read Cyberpunk as a genre as instruction rather than warning
You're even wrong about the pursuing goals bit, preventing "reward hacking" (a term we used well before ML systems were capable of literal hacking for rewards) is one of the most significant part of training pipeline design because Autoregressive systems are astoundingly "goal oriented" in the way they function (though it's important not to anthropomorphize that goal orientation, it's the result of gradient descent not desire)