I think Alphazero is a lot more interesting than Stockfish though. Most notably it lead me to reevaluate positional play. Iirc A0 at around 2-3 ply is still above SuperGM Level which is pretty mind-blowing. Based on this I have increased my strategy to tactics ratio quite a bit. FWIW Stockfish is always evolving and adapting and has incorporated ideas from A0.
Hmm: NNUE was introduced in 2018, the AlphaZero preprint 2017, AlphaGo 2015-2016. I checked this because my memory claimed that it was AlphaGo's success that sparked the new level of interest in NN evaluation.
Wouldn't surprise me if AlphaZero's improvements had no influence in that timeline, but for AlphaGo it would.
The original NNUE paper cites AlphaZero[0]. The architectures are different because NNUE is optimized for CPUs and uses integer quantization and a much smaller network. I don't think one could credibly claim that it would have come about if not for Google making so much noise about their neural network efforts in Go, Chess and Shogi.
For whatever it's worth, the NNUE training dataset contains positions from Leela games and several generations of self-play. Stockfish wouldn't be where it is if not for Google's impact. AlphaFold will likely have a similar impact on our understanding of protein structure. I don't know why everyone is so offended by them puffing their chests out a little bit here, the paper's linked in the article.
The first thing I'd recommend is constantly evaluating positions from a strategic POV ("Evaluate like a GM" is a good book, alternatively look at a lot of positions and evaluate like you were an engine and then engine check).
Second (or first if you lack even the basics to do said evaluation) is understand strategic concepts. A good starting point would be "Simple Chess" the next step would be pawn structures ("Power of Pawns" -> "Chess Structures" would be my recommendations, the latter is probably the greatest chess book in recent times imo). There's also many Chessable courses, I'm quite fond of "Developing Chess Intuition" by GM Raven Sturt and the "Art of..." series by CM Can Kabadayi for lower rated players. The sky is the limit, there's good books all the way up, for example "Mastering Chess Strategy" usually recommended for 2000+ ELO
Third study great positional players like Carlsen, Karpov, Petrosian etc.
I'd say the most important thing to realize is that just like tactics puzzles, there's strategic puzzles but they are not as obvious.
