Exactly. People forget that we did make systems that were just Markov chains long before LLMs, like the famous Usenet Poster "Mark V. Shaney" (created by Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Golang fame) that was trained on Usenet posts in the 1980s. You didn't need deep learning or any sort of neural nets for that. It could come up with sentences that sometimes made some sort of sense, but that was it. The oversimplified way LLMs are sometimes explained makes it sound like they are no different from Mark V. Shaney, but they obviously are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney