It absolutely was used, and heavily. I won't even cover the "it's not ___, it's ___", of which there are MANY in this piece. But beyond that:

Count the lists of three:

    A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger.

   It costs travel and scheduling and the glacial work of building trust. It costs ego management and compromise and the periodic small heartbreak of the author-order negotiation.

    It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost.

    Swap “pilot” for “researcher” and “autopilot” for “agent”, and the mechanism Wang is guarding against is the one Bainbridge named four decades earlier.

    Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone. (ed. - is that *really* Waymo's central feature?)

    once a frictionless option exists, we take it by default, and quietly surrender whatever the friction was doing for us

    Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn

    while the invisible thing that sustained it quietly falls below threshold

    competence quietly erodes precisely because it is needed only rarely

    the quiet risk is that our incentives are training us