Some more recent alternatives to Koza's GP use some very different search mechanisms. FFX & PGE are both very fast.

https://seminars.math.binghamton.edu/ComboSem/worm-chiu.pge_...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.09675

I authored PGE and have thought that RL, and more recently diffusion techniques, might help these algos. All of the algos need better ways to guide the search, or help it get unstuck from local optima, which happens surprisingly fast. Most work in GP / EVO is about avoiding premature convergence.