Yup!. Over 30 years experience here. Landed on the same place with the added feeling of "We were always intended to develop the judgement of what makes sense and maintainable, where is the surprise here?"
People want the "Fluent Text Generator" to think for them because its marketing calls it AI. At the end is just a tensor collection, probabilistically backtracked adjusted, text generator. It does produces fluency in the answer, but the fact that it sounds correct, to the point of passing a compiler approval, has nothing to do with been well thought out.
I think it's easier to make your point without the baggage of the mechanism assertions.
The code is just wrong a lot. By denying the possibility of emergent phenomemona or model interiority you just hand the hypsters an easy point to score.
The code is just wrong, all the time. You're right about the part that matters and that we can measure.