Because the "glorified autocomplete" crowd likes to ignore the technical detail of how the autocomplete actually works.

Yeah. "Glorified autocomplete" might be all the human brain is too. "Glorified autocomplete" can do an amazing number of things, including perhaps pass the Turing test and perhaps ... "think".

"Glorified autocomplete" is meant to describe the _underlying mechanism_, but unfortunately it also sounds like one of the things LLMs are actually used for, so it gives the mistaken impression that the claim is all they are good for is a component inside an editor application.