A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like.

In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm.

(And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towards 'thin-shell' products is kind of an inherent flaw with the current state of ai. Having a very flexible llm with broad applications means that you can just put Chatgpt in a lot of stuff and have it more or less work. With the caveat that what you get is rarely a better UX than what you'd get if you'd just prompted an llm yourself.

When someone isn't using llms, in my experience you get more bespoke engineering. The results might not be better than an llm, but obviously that bespoke code is much more interesting to me as a fellow programmer)