> I wonder if coupling them with ML techniques could bring them back.

EAs are effectively ML techniques. It's all a game of search.

The biggest problem I have seen with these algorithms is that they are wildly irrespective of the underlying hardware that they will inevitably run on top of. Koza, et. al., were effectively playing around in abstraction Narnia when you consider how impractical their designs were (are) to execute on hardware.

An L1-resident hill climber running on a single Zen4+ thread would absolutely smoke every single technique from the 90s combined, simply because it can explore so much more of the search space per unit time. A small tweak to this actually shows up on human timescales and so you can make meaningful iterations. Being made to wait days/weeks each time you want to see how your idea plays out will quickly curtail the space of ideas.