TBH: Tech companies are not much different from how you described cops.
They don't usually bother to learn the tech they are using properly and take all the shortcuts possible. You see this by the current spout of AI startups. Sure, LLMs work pretty good. But most other applications of AI is more like: "LOL, no idea how to solve the problem. I hooked it up to this blackbox, which i don't understand, and trained it to give me the results i want."
While i agree with most of what you said, i think you might be falling into the trap of assuming the curve continues as it had.
Like most technology, ANNs will follow a sigmoid curve. Turing was already working with the same theories. While I did my education in IT, we had really interesting ANNs working, but only nerds would be excited by them. Now ChatGPT surprised the rest of the world and I would assume we are in the steep part of the sigmoid function.
But the problem is, that we can only determine where we where, if we look back. There is no way to say whether NOW is just the start, middle or towards the end of the curve.
What I can say is that now, LLMs and other implementations of AI are able to replace a trainee in my line of work. They still need a lot of supervision and are a tool, which can speed up work. This may lead to other problems: If companies decided to not take on the expensive task of training people and replacing them with cheaper AI - at some point we will run out of well trained veterans.