The Chomsky argument feels like it's moving in a different direction than what's actually useful to know. Whether or not these models have "real" understanding, they're clearly capable of solving problems that were previously considered to require understanding. The more interesting question is whether world models, if they existed, would actually improve the failure modes people care about — like hallucination and planning — or whether we'd just get better stochastic sentence machines with an extra layer of abstraction on top.