[Cybiote]

That is only because subgame perfect equilibrium is applicable to chess. An imperfect information game like Poker cannot have that. Technology is not a process with complete information therefore the chess analogy in the context of technology cannot work. And as bananabiscuit points out, Leela Zero can get away with considering orders of magnitude fewer positions than Stockfish because of the extensive experience from past games encoded into its weights.

Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects.

Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.