> the utility of the current LLMs is obvious

In that they obviously have no real utility, sure. There hasn't been a paradigm shift, they still suck at programming, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise almost certainly has something to sell you.

Based on my direct experience I find this remaining commonality of this opinion surprising, at least with regards to opus in claude code. I'm not as extreme as some who think we can/should avoid touching code or w/e but especially in exploratory contexts and debugging I find them extremely useful.

Maybe I should have said "obvious to me," but I guess I just struggle to see how a serious crack at using modern opus in claude code doesn't make it obvious at this point.

I'd really recommend trying the "spike out a self-contained minimal version of this rearchitecture/migration and troubleshoot it iteratively until it works, then make a report on findings" use-case for anyone that hasn't had luck with them thus far and is serious about trying to reach conclusions based on direct experience.