It does seem like things are moving very quickly even deeper than what you are saying. Less than a year ago langchain, model fine tuning and RAG were the cutting edge and the “thing to do”.

Now because of models improving, context sizes getting bigger, and commercial offerings improving I hardly hear about them.

> what problem was it trying to solve, and how did it do it differently from alternatives?

Sounds to me like accidental complexity. The essential problem is to write good code for the computer to do it's task?

There's an issue if you're (general you) more focused on fixing the tool than on the primary problem, especially when you don't know if the tool is even suitable,