I don't really see this as analogous. Yes, you do choose an abstraction level to operate at, I rarely think in terms of transistors, or even gates (which by your logic an assembly programmer should do).

But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I need to dig into the assembly (but I happens, compiler explorer is in my bookmark bar in Firefox).

Other abstractions are far leakier, it is far more common that I look in wireshark to debug network issues, the application level view is often not enough.

One of the leakiest abstractions currently is LLMs. Maybe in a decade or three they will be good enough, but they aren't yet, that's for sure. At least for the hard realtime systems level programming I do. For code generation they often make enough mistakes that the time spent after review and fixes comes out in the wash, even for simple tools. Their use for bug finding, RAG and similar is however promising.

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out. Understandable but ultimately self defeating. You can in-fact force the LLM to use any pattern you want. I encountered this recently with a hand made framework I wanted to upgrade. It did stuff I didn't like. But well guess what? I provided it new constraints and it started to do what I want. Be as opinionated as you want. That's the whole point. It's basically your intern.