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"LLMs can help non-programmers with no technical background get a foothold in doing something that used to require a LOT of technical knowledge to get started in, putting them in a better position to learn the technical stuff over time by providing a less steep learning curve" feels uncontroversial?

As a former academic I take some issue with this, since just having the tool do work for you is not learning. It's going to a restaurant and pretending you're a chef. If you use the tool to help understand what's going wrong with what you made, i.e. as a tutor, that's a lot better

So the situation I was really talking about is one where you have to learn a lot of technical skills before you can get to the thing you want to actually learn.

In particular, if you want to make videogames, you generally have to learn a lot about programming before you can really get to the part where you're designing games. My hope is that LLMs will facilitate people being able to get to a place where they can design a game, test it, and iterate on it...

This sort of sneaks in the assumption that there's actual design work involved. In my experience, the kind of person who actually puts care and thought into their game design is the same kind of person who doesn't usuallyhave much trouble learning the technical side in the first place.

Conversely, it seems that those who were never ready to put some effort into the technical side of things let the LLM do most of the designing anyway. I don't think this was ever primarily(!) a matter of accessibility but rather a measure of how much effort and care one is willing to put into it.

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That the barrier is on the floor now just makes it that much harder for those putting time and care into their work to get time in the limelight over the never-ending superpowered firehouse of derivative zero-effort slop spam being sprayed all over every distribution channel.