At this point, the question we should all be worried about is what is going to happen once the biggest investors see and internalize these articles? Will the economy withstand the collapse of the AI industry and temporary damage to adjacent tech sectors or will this combined with the dodgy loans taken by Meta/Amazon/Alphabet pull the wider economy into a recession?

I think that just because AI won't be as good for tech as initially promised, it still has penetration potential in the wider economy.

OK I don't have numbers to back it up but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the investment and actual AI use was not tech (software engineering), but other use cases.

Software development is a tiny portion of the AI value proposition. Content summarization and generation for natural language is a much broader use case, among others.