Unless your particular NP-complete problem is trivially a transformation of one with known optimal solutions, it's generally not worth trying.
See entanglement chess ( https://entanglement-chess.netlify.app/help.html ) for an example of a problem that is not NP-hard despite looking that way at first glance.
A solver won’t be the optimal solution that you may (or more likely may not) discover for your particular problem. But it’ll be good enough in most cases.
Which is distinct from spending time trying to find an optimal solution, in the general case.
> For some problems it’ll be optimal in execution time, for most it won’t be and you may be forced to let it approximate. But that’s usually still good enough.
Yes, it depends on your problem and your application. For some problems, you can approximate well, and in some applications that's good. And in some other applications it's fine to occasionally not solve a problem at all.