AlphaFold is real.

To the extent you care about chess and Go as human activities, progress there is real.

there are some other scientific computing problems where AI or neural-network-based methods do appear to be at least part of the actual state-of-the-art (weather forecasting, certain single-molecule quantum chemistry simulations).

i would like the hype of the kind described in the article to be punctured, but this is hard to do if critics make strong absolute claims ("aren't useful in any field whatsoever") which are easily disproven. it hurts credibility.