I would argue that people you are describing enjoying Tik Tok and being too lazy to look stuff up themselves, are not really engineers. You could also frame it as, information technology got so mainstream, even people with no technical background whatsoever are part of it. Engineers and tech nerds still exist, but they are a minority now.

I agree there is a lot of marketing BS around LLMs right now. But I would argue that they are quite useful for e.g. basic language and coding tasks and at least for me these are real-world use cases too.

The headline is misleading. By “real-world use” they mean using ChatGPT and Claude for street navigation in New York. Which is one very specific use-case.