I agree, so many things to disagree in the article.

However, I think you are missing that people are lazy. We all are to some extent, some more than others. Putting effort in doing something, well, takes effort. In my experience most people given the opportunity to do a mediocre job turning their brain off or an excellent job at the expense of great brain effort, they would take the former. And this is happening left, right and center now with LLMs.

And the skill atrophy is real, or at least, I am witnessing it real time on a bunch of coworkers.

I agree with you, you don't HAVE to turn your brain off and produce slop, but people do. And at scale, it diminishes greatly the impact of the self-improvement that you, or a minimal subset of developers are doing.