"I built my network, and it's massively parallel and interconnected and complicated, just like the human brain from which intelligence emerges! Behold, now intelligence shall emerge from this neural network as well!"

Who actually did this? I'm not aware of any such effort, much less it being a trend. Seems to me that the "AI" side of neural networks is almost universally interested in data processing properties of small networks. Larger more complex network experiments are part of neuroscience (naive in most cases but that's a different topic). I don't think anybody in AI or brain research ever thought their network was or would or could be "intelligent" in the broad sense you are implying.