I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.

In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces junk, but progress is pretty appalling)