That would, IMHO, be a big win. Even if the scaling hypothesis is correct, why would you want to solve the problem that way, when there are probably far better ways to solve it.

Sure, we could fly an interstellar spacecraft to another solar system, but it would be a bad idea to do it, because in the time that it would take to get there, some other ways of getting there would be invented. IF you left for the stars now, people would be waiting for you when you got there.

In the same way, simply scaling compute and data may get you to a certain amount of intelligence. But the costs and effort would be huge. It would probably be better to spend that time and effort (and money) on making the underlying ideas better. And even if it turns out that, yes, we have to scale, waiting until computational costs come down further is probably a good idea.