In particular, I found this very misleading or irrelevant:
a typical CPU project anecdotally has about three times as many specification and validation engineers as design engineers and a 5:1 ratio is not unheard of
The reason silicon design has such verification to design ratio is because the cost of one bug is many, many orders of magnitude higher than software. Both in dollar cost and in schedule cost (it takes months to fab a chip, and if you messed up and need to spin a fix, it costs tens of millions of dollars, not counting any design engineering cost).
I don't think you can extrapolate these very industry-specific facts to judging LLMs.