Luck is defined as something happening that was unlikely to happen, so having that in mind that evolution kept happening that is no luck, happens on every living organism (last specimens before extension being the exceptions), that the smarter apes got to reproduce is not luck, it is predictable, that they had to use less muscles if they are smarter is also predictable, that muscles are something primates can give up easier than e.g. liver function it is fairly predictable, that you would prefer to take better care of your smarter offspring is also fairly predictable (not saying it's morally justifiable), and so there are so many aligned factors and feedback loops at play that calling it luck would be a disservice, yes evolution has a slight "brute-force" approach to it that arguably involves "luck" but that it's just a small part of it
There’s a practically infinite space of possible innovations. The fact that any part of it has ever been explored is just down to luck—and that’s ignoring the fact that once evolution discovers an innovation, survival of the fittest is still itself not a rule but rather a likelihood. Maybe there was a fish who could communicate telepathically and fly at the same time there was a fish with feet, but the latter ended up devouring the former in the nursery.
Once you reach a particular point, things might tend to play out in ways that look more deterministic in specific places, but fate is still hard to predict. Consider the Vaquita. A species that has thrived for ages has been nearly wiped out of existence because a random primate species evolved to invent plastic fishing nets, and now that same primate species might altruistically manage to govern itself out of destroying the Vaquita. Really, nothing in that story was guaranteed to happen based on the frontier of the search process 1,000,000 years ago, it was just how the dice landed.
The Vaquita’s survival or loss is playing out in some ways as an international diplomacy story, where the first Trump administration saw declines in Vaquita numbers and the Biden administration took steps to improve their chances, and then Trump was re-elected, with some people believing that came down to Biden—a single human man who does not live in Mexico—experiencing age-related declines, and with others believing oligarchs bought the election to support causes like Russia’s pursuit of Ukraine. Really, this is about as random and as divorced from survival of the fittest as it gets. But it is no more random than the fact that the person who might have ushered in 1,000,000-year era of world piece and cured all suffering in all species would be just as likely to die as a child in a car accident as anyone else.
In ML, evolutionary algorithms are classified under randomized optimization, due to the way that they take random steps to forge random paths into vast combinatorial spaces that could never be completely understood or completely explored.