Most of this discourse feels like some kind of religious ritual built on the foundation of authority bias. Where is the evidence that skills improves performance over any other methodology outside of the fact of its nascent popularity?

I do agree with Jacques Ellul in Technological Society that technique precedes science, and that's certainly the case with LLMs; however, this whole industry waves off rigorous validation in favor of personal anecdotes ("it feels more productive to me!" "they didn't study after Opus 4.5 was released").