The "danger" was in terms of spam / misinformation proliferation, not the same category of capabilities adjacent risks current discussed.
You can hold your own opinions on spam/misinformation as a problem, but to say there was no credibly anticipated outsized downside to a sudden jump in human-passing text generation feels pretty off to me.
It's the kind of people that want to ban anything because of some theoretical small harm is technically possible. We're lucky it's not more prevalent or we'd still be in the stone age.
They were right about the risks.
(It's also amazing to me that it took mere minutes for this observation, deep in a sub-thread, to get downvoted without any reply, with no obvious reason for it.)
Nobody believed or suggested that GPT2 could do longform or produce novel text that stood up against careful scrutiny as insightful or well informed. But because the capabilities were novel, people would have no strong alternative than to believe some person wrote it.
You current tripping over LLMisms is irrelevant. You have years of antibodies, both personal and herd-immunity (eg, the many, many articles and comments that describe LLMisms).