To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem.

Yes, some of it looks silly now, though it's always easy to criticize with hindsight: the models could do unexpectedly impressive things and we didn't fully know the limit yet, it was a black box.

Remember you're critcising the org that actually made it public to people earlier than any other: the uncertainty was a temporary caution. The "open" in OpenAI was because they made it available, unlike Google at the time.