With LLMs you pay per token, so if you can express the same code in 1 / 10th the tokens that absolutely matters. Moreover they have a finite context window, so more concise syntax can make that more economical.
To ship what I do now would've cost a few million dollars per year in terms of the team needed to maintain it now its 1000x cheaper
My argument was that syntax still matters because LLMs communicate in syntax, and they pay for that per token, therefore LLMs make syntax more relevent as you can actually calculate cost to write in one language versus another.
I'm not arguing that humans can compete with a network of agents.