It feels a little like cheating, but I guess processing the game UI video feed isn't the interesting part of the problem. Plus, it makes the problem much more accessible to hobbyists who can't afford the GPU cluster required to productively experiment on models that process streams of 1080p video.
Still, in principle, I think modern ML modeling approaches could handle the problem of transforming the video feed into a useful high level state representation. I don't think I misunderstood the OP in that regard at least.
[1] - https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2/blob/master/docs/environme...