LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior)... and even more important traits.
LLMs don't write code like that. Many people have tried with many prompts. It's mostly good for just generating stuff once and maybe do little modifications while convincingly arguing the code has no bugs (and it has).
You seem to confuse one-off projects that have zero to little need for maintenance for actual commercial programming, perhaps?
Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and very far from transferable to it. Also I am 100% convinced nobody is going to protect the programmers; business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic
Like your parent commenter, if LLMs get on my level, I'd be _happy_ to retire. I don't have a super vested interest in commercial programming, in fact I became as good at it in the last several years because I started hating it and wanted to get all my tasks done with minimal time expended; so I am quite confident in my assessment that LLMs are barely at the level of a diligent but not very good junior dev at the moment, and have been for the last at least 6 months.
Your take is rather romantic.