Many advances have their slop version, look at any trend which began as broadly positive and became infested with a tacky parade of bandwagon pretenders.
AI is just the next example, and the internet is particularly troublesome at filtering up the most tacky.
Always remember the broadly positive aspects remain, they're simply obscured by dusty clouds from the bandwagon.
Hey, at least it lowers expectations enough that Linux Desktop is good enough with the latest KDE Plasma and to a some extent Gnome.
Apple lost it's broken but incessant leader, and Tim Cook is lets' face it a chair warmer in comparison.
Say what you want, but the disillusionment is sat there, in your view, or you simply never knew Apple when it was "good".
Hey, maybe people will actually understand why proprietary software is, if not immoral, it's the on-ramp for mass control and manipulation that makes the TV central broadcast propaganda soup era, nothing at all in comparison to the manipulation of people by software.
I think you nailed the drive behind my ~3 decades of Emacs use: "I can get at all the text" (possibly above the customization/automation benefits despite this being the "advanced" pov above "it's just a text editor isn't it?"
Some of the older heads here are 100% with you, the notes and comments in this thread should be clear enough indication of that.
But you're right, tools that make short work of ridiculous incantations, 100% good.
We don't sit around trying to re-write arithmetic, but apparently not knowing how to do git pull --rebase is a crime to these smart folks, who don't seem to realize they know very little about getting sh!t done.
I made ocomacs for this purpose, it's designed as a minimal config layer which is more of a pattern to follow than a "does everything for you" framework.