The non-connectionist, classical, symbolical aspect is not so much "search" per se, but the fact that MCTS performs a form of look-ahead, which requires manually encoding the rules of the game in some fashion.
Determining what the legal moves in a state are, and what state results from a given move, is not something the AI would learn by itself, but is programmed into the system by a human expert.
Indeed, in this latest iteration the network learns a model of the game by itself. Note however that it still uses MCTS and performs a look-ahead, i.e. it is still being "told" by the programmers how to do search (planning), only now it is left to the system to determine how it wants to represent states/actions/policies internally.
Determining what the legal moves in a state are, and what state results from a given move, is not something the AI would learn by itself, but is programmed into the system by a human expert.