we should pursue approaches to intelligence that treat embodiment and interaction with the environment as primary
And they do. But it's also completely normal for researchers to convince others to work on certain problems they care about.
I mean, if someone is arguingtthat we should work harder to go to space, answering that they should just go ahead and do it themselves is quite far from being an helpful answer, isn't it?
Why not say 'NASA' or 'my colleagues at NASA' or 'as a scientist' or 'humanity'. One should at least indicate the group the collective noun relates to, rather than assume this is understood. One shouldn't assume that one can speak for everyone, when that is most likely not the case.
That it invokes the idea of a consensus humanity, that one group can speak and decide for everyone (say, scientists or politicians) is a psychological trick, imo, in that it presumes a consensus.
I think the problem (if it can be called that) is that LLMs are useful today, while we still haven't solved the embodiment problem. There's a lot more research before that'll work well, while LLMs have uses today. So the money goes to the LLMs. While it's pretty obvious that solving the problem would change society, it's also not clear how close we are to doing it. That makes it much harder to get the capital as it is a much larger risk.