I have to say the LLMs probably can do a lot of these things properly if you had access to the entire infrastructure for a single project but as you said, it is simply not economical to use. I'd rather have people maintain systems before lock in happens and someone hikes the prices and rug pulls me. In almost all cases you need someone experienced anyway to sign off on the changes it makes or to keep guidelines and guardrails intact.

I don't believe the "you are holding it wrong", "works on my machine", "works on this model" or "do this spec structure" type of arguments to compensate the fundamental issues. The tech simply does not do what is advertised and claimed as it is.