Even the relative importance of brute-force search capabilities has declined greatly.

Thanks for updating me; I was indeed thinking of Deep Blue in the mid 90s. Good to know that chess programs are becoming more intelligent and less forceful.

(This outcome was disappointing in a sense, since it basically turned out that the human grandmasters' extraordinary strategic abilities are much more due to recognizing a multitude of patterns learned from experience than flashes of brilliant insight.)

This is what I would expect; a flash of brilliant insight is what recognizing a pattern feels like from the inside.