I do find value in papers. I have a series of posts where I dig into papers that I find noteworthy and try to translate them into more easily understood terms. I wish more people would do that - it frustrates me that paper authors themselves only occasionally post accompanying commentary that helps explain the paper outside of the confines of academic writing. https://simonwillison.net/tags/paper-review/

One challenge we have here is that there are a lot of people who are desperate for evidence that LLMs are a waste of time, and they will leap on any paper that supports that narrative. This leads to a slightly perverse incentive where publishing papers that are critical of AI is a great way to get a whole lot of attention on that paper.

In that way academic papers and blogging aren't as distinct as you might hope!