Which is where the "emacsification" analogy breaks for me.

The reason people who like emacs write their one-off program in emacs is that it is an extraordinarily introspectable and debuggable programming environment. There is no "code, compile, run" loop - you just write code against the live running environment. Devoid of that fast feedback loop, writing code just isn't as much fun.

Well taken, but for MANY years, I copied and pasted elisp snippets off stackoverflow without understanding any of it. And to this day, there as many xkcd-style "space heaters" as there are emacs users. OP's point stands that LLMs make possible a new generation of quicker, dirtier hacks destined for the cruft heap.