Let me simplify it for the sake of argument. Imagine I am unable to follow a middle school proof of Pythagoras. How does it matter if I trust anyone beyond that? What possible contribution can I build on top of that?
How come? It plainly negates the "easy" part. It's not easy at all, you need to scale your signal path to the magnitude of power. I.e. the expensive part.
FPV drones in the Russian war are generally pretty dumb devices, there's usually no frequency hopping involved to begin with. They have a lot more in common with baby monitors than with modern military comms.
I didn't say they have no value. Just limited value. A novel readable proof that expands the horizons of human insight is certainly more valuable than a megabyte sized trychnobezoar of machine generated predicates.
What happens in countries with no rule of law is rule of power hierarchies. A regional party boss would have his trusted deputes running things, who have their underlings, they underlings have their preferred business partners (police chiefs, businessmen, prosecutors, control authorities) and so on. A bribe at any level is always redistributed upwards.
Sometimes the big guy falls out of favor with bigger guys, and then the whole structure is up for grabs. The whole vertical is massacred (sometimes literally) while new people take over from the top down. Often what's visible happens a few degrees removed from the actual cause.
There's understanding among the ruling class and much of the populace that it's just How Things are Done. But moments like that give you public trials with executions that make some naïve Westerners clap.
I have in fact masters in SE and three decades experience of commercial programming. Loved every minute of it (well except the burnout episode) and still do my hobby projects. So I would say no, you are wrong. The models decimate not just the coding (the best and the most fun part of development) but all the pseudo-engineering roles like architects or product managers too. Simply because there's less need for communication in the team as the surface of work for each dev is now quite enormous.
It's fine for your pet projects. But for most of professional programming it's no longer feasible as you'll be at a small fraction of your machine assisted performance.
You know how I read new papers back in 1994? By going to the library, finding one in bi-annual publication list and requesting it through the University system. And it better be necessary because the uni had to pay both the catalogue and each reprint of an article. The access is most certainly easier today.