Intelligence still uses an evolutionary search strategy, it is just internalized and approximate. Your brain considers a large number of potential routes in a highly compressed statistical approximation of reality, and the most promising eventually get written up or coded up and become real designs in the real world. But this entire process is still all evolutionary.

In the sense that it consists of copying with variation and differential reproductive success, yes.

However, evolution using intelligence isn't the same as evolution by random mutations - and you originally went on to draw conclusions about the optimality of organic evolution - which was mostly the "random mutations" kind.