I would wager that over the last several decades BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) has done more to advance our knowledge of biology than any other algorithm.
https://bioinformaticsreview.com/20210503/how-blast-works-co...
"The heart of many well-known programs is a dynamic programming algorithm, or a fast approximation of one, including sequence database search programs like BLAST..."
If you, by optimization mean that there's a function value you are maximizing or minimizing, than that's not true either, since Subset Sum and Hamiltonian path are canonical decision problems for which DP is used.
Heck, you can even take the standard TSP DP algorithm and, instead of looking at all possible "exit vertices" in linear time, look at a randomly chosen constant number of candidates, thereby reducing the running time by a factor n and getting a randomized heuristic function not guaranteed to give the optimal value.
This reminds me of biologists bickering about what is or is not a gene, and endless snorefests of ontologists bickering about the semantics of a label on an edge in a graph.
It was not amusing then either.