I love these papers. In my undergrad (2008?) we read one by Robert Bixby (and others?) on integer programming, where IIRC the authors measured a 10000x speedup over some number of decades because of algorithmic improvements.

You can roll your eyes at constant-factor speedups for NP-complete problems, but in the real world these can (and, IME do) turn some problems from intractable to tractable, or from "go and get a coffee" to "interactive HTTP call".

That said, I suppose if you compared the resource requirements for playing Go to a certain level, the advancements in ML rather beat out the old-school optimisation algorithm progress. Not an apples-to-apples comparison, but that's not super important if you're willing to settle for suboptimal solutions.