Came here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear.

In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers.

As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143