Yeah, there appears to be this idea that "being smart" is the same thing as "knowing facts", which I don't think is realistic.

I know plenty of people who are considerably smarter than me, but don't know nearly as much as I do about computer science or obscure 90's video game trivia. Just because I know more facts than they do (at least in this very limited scope) doesn't mean that they're less capable of learning than I am.

As you said, a barista is very likely able to reason about and learn new things, which is not something an LLM can really do.