LLMs do qualify though, because really they're graph neural nets applied to language. The advantage they had over RNNs was that they could leverage parallel compute and scale to colossal datasets in a way that RNNs just never will.
LLMs obviously qualify as an example of the bitter lesson. The point I was replying to was using Stockfish as an example of how the bitter lesson was wrong, and I was pointing out that Stockfish-like systems are the core example used in the actual essay