I bumped heads here before on that take, but I can empathize deeply with these people.

I expect that interacting with most of them will be infuriating, since they probably accepted the "this is just how things are done from now on" narrative of AI and are some level of infatuated with the fancy demos.

But this acceptance is also where the inescapable soul-crushing comes from. If you can adopt an internal posture of resistance, the prevalence of AI is still grating but you can adopt a perspective that doesn't devalue your own skill and makes personal impact conceivable. Many of these folks are pretty far gone, but a pipeline of recovery should be possible from a starting point like this.