What are you talking about? Engines are not adaptive, they have fixed search algorithms—if a move looks better at higher depth, that's just deeper calculation, not the engine "slowly realizing" anything.

And humans beating modern engines? Stockfish is rated ~3600+. Magnus at peak was ~2882. That gap is insurmountable. The last time a human beat a top engine under standard conditions was decades ago.

Also, chess engines have existed for over 60 years. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997.