Just like you should be able to say something positive about Javascript (async-everything instead of a bolted-on async subecosystem, event loop has its upsides, single-threaded has its upsides, has a first class promise, etc) even if you don't like using it.
This can be a perfectly valid argument for many reasons. Their use case isn’t well documented, can’t be publicly disclosed, involves APIs that aren’t public, or are actual research and not summarizing printed research to name a few I’ve run into myself.
This argument that “engineers are boring and afraid for their jobs” is ignoring the fact that these are usually professionals with years of experience in their fields and probably perfectly able to assess the usefulness of a tool for their purposes.
Your role is between the two: deciding on the architecture, writing the top-level types, deciding on the concrete system design.
And then AI tools help you zoom in and glue things together in an easily verifiable way.
I suspect that people who still haven't figured out how to make use of LLMs, assuming it's not just resentful performative complaining which it probably is, are expecting it to do it all. Which never seemed very engineer-minded.