Ever since the emergence of leetcode style interviews I've been shocked at how many people can reproduce leetcode examples, but still fundamentally have no sense of algorithm design outside of the context of a job interview.
Programmers with their sights set on acing a FAANG interview will just keep repeating leetcode problems until they start to memorize the common patterns (not the problems themselves of course, but the structure of these type of problems). What's disturbing to me is that I recall far more interesting discussion about algorithms in the era before leetcode dominated everything.
The common solution isn't to understand algorithms better, but to become a leetcode solving robot.
So it's no surprise to me that AI can pretty easily replicate humans that have tried to turn themselves into robots.
We see similar patterns in the art that AI can create. It's very good at replicating a kind of art style of designers trying to turn themselves into design robots.