This is logical, but it relies on the purchaser being able to evaluate if the tool sucks or not. Each blogger hyping it or advertisement promotes the idea of how automatic, transformative and intelligent these tools are. The decision makers such as execs, VPs, or directors spending begin to lose a clear boundry on what AI is what it can or cant do. So they write the check, rather than miss out, its human nature to follow the pack.

My managers/bosses are non technical so for them watching an agent write python code to scrape a website is like magic because its beyond what they know. And while its not a large upfront cost, it make take a while to see the errors or critical biases in a system one doesnt understand.

So i would argue its more devious because its hard to measure if its really what its marketed to be, but it sure feeeeels like it to less technical people.

this is more about large scale corporate adoption, what you say is true for individual engineers imo