Working for an 80.000+ employee company, one has already accepted a certain degree of inertia.

This is particular, specifically problematic territory. I cannot imagine handing over proprietary data to a third party without a contract in place for how that data is stored and used. It’s not about innovation, it’s about using someone else’s tools without ownership. For the other case, it’s both about integrity in owning your own work, and a shield from legal consequences. These things should be very relevant to any business.

I also don’t know any professional devs who have used tools like copilot and said they were anything but a toy. I am more bullish on LLMs than most of my coworkers. I think there is a lot of potential there. I do not see that potential in the current commercial offerings, and the financial outlay to fine-tune an open-source model and run it at scale is…prohibitive.

> I also don’t know any professional devs who have used tools like copilot and said they were anything but a toy.

Really? I'm academic now but I find Copilot at least moderately helpful when I'm writing a library. It's pretty good a lot of boilerplate functions, docstrings, regex, etc. I certainly don't want to go back to not using it, my code is a lot closer to production quality now and looks nicer.

Thinking back to my days in back-end it seems like it would have been very helpful/sped things up so I'm surprised to hear it's just a toy but I've been out of the professional game for a while now. What's the main criticism?

That's not banning all uncharted territory, it's banning specific legally fraught territory.