I'd say it's not new. Take fluid dynamics as an example, the navier stokes equations predict the motion of fluids very well but you need to approximately solve them on a computer in order to get useful predictions for most setups. I guess the difference is the equation is compact and the derivation from continuum mechanics is easy enough to follow. People still rely on heuristics to answer "how does a wing produce lift?". These heuristic models are completely useless at "how much lift will this particular wing produce under these conditions?". Seems like the same kind of situation. Maybe progress forward will look like producing compact models or tooling to reason about why a particular thing happened.