Somewhat related: In 2018, Google DeepMind had already created AIs that were capable of beating professional gamers in StarCraft 2 (the sequel to Brood War): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs
AlphaStar won a showmatch against TLO. TLO was never one of the strongest players in the world. He had been retired for over three years by the time of the match. Google set the rule that their system would have human-like mechanics, but it played several times faster than any human, never issued a wasted action, had an inhumanly fast reaction time, issued commands with perfect accuracy using an API, and could see the entire map at once.
It was later released to the open ladder with more human-level mechanics. Even strong amateurs regularly beat it. I have beaten it myself. It was strong, but not even close to the level of the strongest human players. It had obvious and easily-exploitable deficiencies in strategy and building placement.
I think even the cheater version would have lost handily to Serral or any of the strongest players.
(It apparently beat MaNa as well as TLO, but those matches were never released to my knowledge. I see no reason to assume Google cheated less flagrantly in private than they did in public.)
Marine staggering for example seems like an ideal code mode task.
On the other hand, I do think LLM-based bots will quickly outperform the decision-making of many of the hand-coded bots, so maybe they won't need so much APM to be competitive.