"You could say the same thing about human programmers, but I've never heard anyone say they think that programmers "execute" Jira tickets."

Yes I could. We have "executives", for starters. And first "computers" were actual humans.

"That was eons ago."

Yes, technically I should call them LRMs (large reasoning models) not LLMs. But that doesn't seem relevant here, to my point they encode some logic (which we want to be close to classical logic, i.e. behavior of words like "true", "and", "not" and so on matches).