Given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just precompute every possible outcome and call it a neural network. You'll be praised as a genius.
Ah yes, I forgot. Deepmind just secretly computed all 10^100 board states for alphago...
Neural nets have been very successful for a lot of things while also being overhyped, but dismissing it all as marketing hype is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is like saying "given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just factor large semiprimes by exhaustive search." It's both true and uninteresting because nobody has or ever will have that much time, energy, and computing power.
Where "enough" is "more than is available in the universe". The number of outcomes you'd need to precompute exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
Given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just precompute every possible outcome and call it a neural network. You'll be praised as a genius.