Will history look back at comments like these as people being dumb, or people trying to cope?

It's denial and coping. Most people i see show this tendency around AI which is also why it 's easy to be far ahead of most population nowadays

A 3rd possibility is that they simply have not been exposed to the best models available (which is extremely likely if you only use the free tier chatbots), and/or did not invest the effort needed to truly harness this new very weird new technology, and so had a very skewed perspective of their actual capabilities.

Both