"Helping the disabled" is trotted out regularly by the glazers without any apparent actual focus or interest in that except to try to silence dissent.

So much of the "AI" grift is Rube Goldberg machines that require a lot more energy and put out more pollution to do something that could have been already done before.

Yeh. Teammate ai is a real one. Some games do have incredibly cool teammate ai. The old star wars republic commando game comes to mind. You could order your dudes around using simple commands and they'd interact with special points in the map that would dictate certain behaviors like using heavy weapons or long range weapons. It was very elegant and well suited to the game.

It's wild that only in the last few years have game devs really nailed having friendly npcs keep pace with the player instead of being inconsistently too fast or too slow.

I could go on a whole ass rant about enemy ai. The problem is; you need enemies that are engaging to the average player. The ongoing Helldivers 2 fiasco demonstrates this.