It's true, but I see it happening. I’ve watched seniors with 30+ years of experience adopt them successfully without losing their classic rigor.
Personally, I get huge mileage out of LLMs, and yes, I care deeply about code quality, readability, and debuggability.
I've seen juniors absolutely rock with them.
And I've seen the exact opposite, where they just struggle to get good results.
In the end, I think the divide comes down to management experience. The people thriving are the ones who have led teams, especially teams of contractors, which is the best analogy for how you have to interact with an LLM.
Those folks know how to break down problems, provide the right context, and scope a task just enough to see the "contractor" succeed before letting them move forward.
On the other hand, individual contributors who are used to just grinding solo often struggle. They expect a one-shot miracle. They say, "Hey, my code is buggy, fix it." When the LLM inevitably hallucinates or steers them wrong, they give up. The results are completely different based on how you treat the tool.
They might just have a high quality of control and standards that it is hard to find that pattern with the LLMs.
I think fierce individual contributors are a lot more valuable in the era of llms as well. We as humans typically achieve better balance with new stuff when we allow backlash from new processes that start to trample on old ones without understanding AKA the Chester's fence.
Anyways, more of a ramble than my two cents.