Wow, this article is a gem. Another quote:
The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
Yes! I've totally seen this with other tech fads. I remember other engineers talking about how they got something like one job offer a day on Linked In, after they had halfway plausibly been able to put the latest tech buzzword on their skills list. But the actual project they worked on was a complete and utter useless waste of money.