It would not have been realistic to have PhD students manually comb through thousands of square kilometers of LIDAR data, and crossreference everything with existing sites; LLMs have turned this into low-hanging fruit.
Can't expect every single scientific field to immediately use any new technology to its full potential, and it makes you sound like a prick, too.
The real answer is financial incentives tied to publishing of research - something that academics in gatekept fields see as the thin edge of the wedge in exposing a utility/ROI gap for legacy practitioners.