to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post
All new technology is overestimated short term, but underestimated long term.
We might not have autonomous driving that takes our kids at school, but we have cars that can recognize lanes and other cars and complain if something is dangerous. We also have facial recognition, voice recognition and almost turing level chatbots to sell you stuff.
I suspect AI might be analogous to computer graphics. Purists in the beginning said the holy grail was ray tracing. However, people still worked on the problem, marching the state of the art forward with smaller building blocks, and now that ray tracing is appearing, a practiced eye is needed to see the difference.
Well, no, some technology is overestimated short term and also overestimated long term.
For example, flying cars. Nuclear fusion (though that one could still come through). Gallium arsenide (still one of my favorite names for a speed-metal band, and still available as far as I know).
The question is, which category is AI going to be in? AI for specific tasks seems likely to be underestimated long term. AGI? My guess is that it's overestimated long term, because it isn't going to happen. That's a guess. Evidence? Don't have any. Guesses are like that.
Anytime there's new progress in AI, you will see many comments or posts some variations of "but humans do it more efficiently" (in arbitrary dimension) or "what about the other problem AI didn't solve". More often than not these are just some lazy layman criticism that makes the posters feel smart without offering anything new or substantial.