Speaking from experience, the LLM agents adapt fairly well to these contexts too. It's not at all FUD, you're at a significant disadvantage if you don't compete with AI now. I went to a CTF recently against teams I have won against every year, and within 10 minutes of the event starting they had solved every challenge. They have an agent loop and it solves everything immediately, so they won. Anyone attempting to solve the challenges on their own has no chance, even if you think "maybe this is too out of the box for LLMs". Furthermore, the DEFCON CTF you're referring to has quals, and if you don't qualify you don't get those challenges in the finals. Quals has mainly binary exploitation challenges which Opus (and others) solve as long as you hold the gas pedal down on your API bill. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say CTF is dead, as a competitor.
I made a site to use LLMs to help me with reverse engineering. The output is surprisingly readable, even with C++ classes. Let me know any feedback you might have: https://decompiler.zeroday.engineering/
SwissVPN. Without going into detail, I'm aware how they respond to all kinds of information requests due to my previous type of work. That earned my business.