Yes, the hardware is optimized over time. But the emergent experience of consciousness isn't described in that hardware. If you're a pure materialist, you believe said experience is still present physically—likely in some combination of brain matter and the ongoing electrical currents flowing through them. But there's no "place" where consciousness sits.

Its the same thing with a game running on a computer. You can point to different systems for specific aspects of it. But you can't show me where, either in software or hardware, the experience of the game lives.