I used to (early 00s) be super big into GA and GP until a professor of mine at the time described the whole class of algorithms as "Marginally better than brute forcing". That really resonated with my experience, and was just too spot-on to ignore.
GP finds good working trees for complex real world problems in a single night on a consumer GPU which you would definitely need to brute force for (millions of) years to find. Quite a margin!
