The concern for me about LLMs confabulating is not that humans don't do it. It's that the massive scale at which LLMs will inevitably be deployed makes even the smallest confabulation extremely risky.
"Many small errors" makes a presumption about LLM confabulation/hallucination that seems unwarranted. Pre-LLM humans (and our computers) have managed vast nuclear arsenals, bioweapons research, and ubiquitous global transport - as a few examples - without any catastrophic mistakes, so far. What can we reasonably expect as a likely worst case scenario if LLMs replacing all the relevant expertise and execution?
I am watching people trust LLM-based analysis and actions 100% of the time without checking.
With the advent of LLMs, a new deployment now takes 3 days. Consequently, errors requiring human attention crop up several times a day.