because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me.

One imagines Lee Sedol telling himself the same thing. True one day and false the next.

It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable

Spend some time working with frontier models like Fable and Astra. It's clear you haven't. Or if you have, you haven't paid attention to anything but acceptance of the final work product.

"Thinking really hard," LOL. You won't beat an LLM at that. No one ever will again. Insights are still our domain as humans -- if only because the motivations behind them are still entirely ours -- but now we can put those insights into practice at a rate never possible before. And your reaction is disgust?

Meanwhile managers are forcing workers to use LLMs for everything, for no clear reason

I'm with you there. Don't worry, those managers will be the next to go.