If you look from the lenses of BigTech and corporations, yes code was not a bottleneck.
But, if you look from the perspective of startups, rigorous planning was because resources to produce features were limited, which means producing a working code was a bottleneck, because in small teams you don't have coordination overhead, idea and vision is clear for them -> to produce something they have discussed and agreed on already.
My takeaway is, when discussing broad topics like usefulness of AI/LLM, don't generalize your assumptions. Code was bottleneck for some, not for others