If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway)
And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now.
I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs.
Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.