> hugely multidimentional number line mapped to words

No. That hugely multidimensional vector maps to much higher abstractions than words.

We are talking about deep learning models with hundreds of layers and trillions of parameters.

They learn patterns of reasoning from data and learn a conceptual model. This is already quite obvious and not really disputed. What is disputed is how accurate that model is. The emulation is pretty good but it's only an emulation.