I don't think that's entirely correct. Learning, understanding and adapting isn't the end product. A thing that meets a user need or business objective is.
That might need understanding as an intermediate step but that's not strictly speaking always necessary. If the LLM can puke out something that fulfills the need that's mission accomplished, skipped straight to end goal.
For better or worse we're now in a world where that works some of the time. And that's enough for companies to keep pushing this - try it everywhere, revert where it fails.
For me it’s the flatly self-insistent prose.