Yes, from a programmer's perspective, this is insane. But the team may have been made up of people without coding experience who maybe didn't even know what a script was. I imagine there are a lot of people right now who "know AI" and not much else, for whom this would be a genuinely new insight...

Note that even before AI, there were a lot of manual data munging jobs that could famously be replaced by "a very small shell script".

I worry, this might become worse if we see the emergence of "100% nontechnical tech startups" where no one in the entire org knows how to code - because why would you, we have AI for that...