The primary counterargument can be framed in terms of Rich Sutton's famous essay, "The Bitter Lesson," which argues that the entire history of AI has taught us that attempts to build in human-like cognitive structures (like embodiment) are always eventually outperformed by general methods that just leverage massive-scale computation.

That's not what it says, but that hand-made heuristics are defeated by general methods. There is no reason why the same methods should not perform even better when informed by data through interacting with the world.