Go read an AI textbook from the 80’s. It was all about optimizations and heuristics. That was the field.
Now if you write a SAT solver or a code optimizer you do t call it AI. But those algorithms were invented by AI researchers back when the population as a whole considered these sorts of things to be intelligent behavior.
I agree with you that it was called AI by the field, but that’s also why the field was a joke imo.
Until LLMs everything casually called AI clearly wasn’t intelligence and the field was pretty uninteresting - looked like a deadend with no idea how to actually build intelligence. That changed around 2014, but it wasn’t because of GOFAI, it was because of a new approach.
Now if you write a SAT solver or a code optimizer you do t call it AI. But those algorithms were invented by AI researchers back when the population as a whole considered these sorts of things to be intelligent behavior.