Neural architecture search (NAS) is a thing! But it's almost exclusively based on meta-gradients. Again, wouldn't put my money on GAs ever outperforming gradient-based methods again.
GAs follow gradients too. It's a different learning approach. All learning follows gradients in one form or another except brute force search, which is not feasible for anything larger than about 2^80 bits of state space. Evolution is not brute force.