Similar story: signed up at https://app.emergent.sh, funded by YC; total crap. Btw, they've raised over $100M

Is it just money laundering?

The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.