It's much more difficult than it used to be, but I think there is still some value to human guidance, more as a "referee" than anything else.

Right now we have essentially two top tier engines -- traditional brute force with alpha beta pruning (stockfish), and ML (leela). Both alone are incredibly strong, but they are strongest and weakest in different types of positions. A computer chess expert, who knows what kind of positions favor stockfish and what kind favor leela, could act as a "referee" between the two engines when they disagree, and when they are unanimous, simply accept the move.

Ten years ago, a grandmaster driving a single engine could typically beat an equal strength engine. I don't think that's the case anymore.

But I think if you have someone who is an expert at computer chess -- not so much a chess grandmaster, and you gave them Leela AND SF, and let them pick which one to use when in the case of conflicts -- they would score positive against either leela or stockfish in isolation.

Larry Kaufman designed his new opening repertoire book by doing exactly this -- running Leela on 2 cores + GPU, and stockfish on 6 cores, and doing the conflict resolution with his own judgement.

The human can certainly no longer pull his own moves out of thin air, though.

The match you are referring to was played under tournament conditions that clearly handicapped the human Grandmaster. I read from the report of the match [0] that "The total time for the match was more than 10 hours [...] The two decisive games lasted 147 and 97 moves." This unfavourable conditions clearly penalized the human and so the result can hardly be taken as meaningful regarding the strategic superiority. From the quietness of my room I instead regularly find strategic plans that overcome my and my opponent's computers. Feel free to join the correspondence chess federation [1] to experience the joy and pain of strategic research!

[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... [1] www.iccf.com