> would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. [...] Who would they be trying to impress?

I agree with most of what you said, but as someone working in the security field, I know enough adults that I'd suspect doing something just for the heck of it. Not maliciously for any particular gain, but for the hack value -- assuming it's not deemed too easy to pull off and thus not interesting to try

Overall, of course, yeah I agree people generally want to do good, and doubly so in a community like Gentoo

> maybe I picked them up too early but I don’t like what they produce.

You don't use translation engines? As someone living in a country whose language they're still learning, I can't tell you how helpful translations from DeepL are. They're not flawless, but it's at a level that I come across polite and well enough towards someone like a prospective landlord or government agency, and my language skills good enough that I can see where it got the meaning wrong (so long as it's not some subtlety, but then it tries to be formal so that's also not often an issue). I'm sure there's more examples but just in general, I really do see their benefit even if I also see the concerns