I'm yet to see perfect code from a human or ai. Most of the people I work with that want everything to be in a perfect state typically get way less done. To your point, sometimes we are just mechanics and that's okay.

Perhaps detractors just gave up and didn't bother improving, but I'm able to prompt the AI to write excellent code. And it's very easy to correct when it's gone awry . This idea that all AI code is bad is just the ego talking.