That was not what was argued, and not what I am arguing. OP claimed that "only someone who has never built anything of significant complexity and utility can think that putting natural language encoding between you and the bytes is a net positive."

Unless OP is also willing to claim that all the people who are working on LLM dev tools are frauds, and act against their better knowledge, OPs claim is obviously false. The entire premise that the people who build these tools operate under is that natural language "between you and bytes" can be a net positive.