Couldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?

Not, because it isn’t. A plug and play arduino is useless without some level of circuit building expertise.

The article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing.

LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories.

They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.