Protein folding is in no way "solved". AlphaFold dramatically improved the state-of-the-art, and works very well for monomeric protein chains with structurally resolved nearest neighbors. It abjectly fails on the most interesting proteins - just go check out any of the industry's hottest undrugged targets (e.g. transcription factors)
> When it comes to very complicated things, physics tends to fall down and we need to try non-physics modeling, and/or come up with non-physics abstraction.
"When things are complicated, if I just dream that it is not complicated and solve another problem than the one I have, I find a great solution!"
Joking apart, models that can help target potentially very interesting sub phase space much smaller than the original one, are incredibly useful, but fundamental understanding of the underlying principles, allowing to make very educated guesses on what can and cannot be ignored, usually wins against throwing everything at the wall...
And as you are pointing out, when the complex reality comes knocking in it usually is much much messier...
I have your spherical cow standing on a frictionless surface right here, sir. If you act quickly, I can include the "spherical gaussian sphere" addon with it, at no extra cost.