i begin to suspect that a society where no one is allowed to feel like they have enough, or can ever relax, isn’t turning out the nicest people

LLMs are like an irresponsible general contractor that offers cheap unqualified work, says "yeah I can totally do that, for half the cost", then youtubes their way to the solution. You might get lucky & they manage to do the job right, but mostly not. And if not, often you don't find out until some other skilled contractor comes in & says "yikes!" at what they see. The problem with trying to bypass skilled labor is that if you don't have the skill, you have no idea when a solution is wrong.