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The researchers of this era did not see those limits yet. They saw the early wins, and they made predictions.
In 1958, Herbert Simon wrote that within ten years a computer would be the world chess champion, prove new mathematical theorems, and compose music of real beauty. The chess champion alone took until 1997, nearly forty years. In 1965 he went further: within twenty years, machines would do any work a person can do.
He was wrong. So was Minsky, who said in 1970 that "within a generation, the problem of creating artificial intelligence will substantially be solved."
These were not idle guesses. They came from careful, serious people who had already built things that worked, then drew a straight line from there to everything else. The line was catastrophically wrong.
Because the problems they had solved were the small, tidy ones. The mazes you can check by hand. They mistook solving those for being almost done.