It's super easy to learn how algorithms and what not work without knowing the syntax of a language. I can tell you how a binary search tree works, but I have no clue how to code it in Java because I've never used Java.

I'm a full stack polyglot and tbh I couldn't program in some languages without reference docs / LLM even though I ship production code in those language all the time. Memorizing all of the function and method names and all of the syntax/design pattern stuff is pretty hard especially when it's not really needed in contemporary dev.

You'd think that, but I believe you are underestimating people's ability to mindlessly memorize stuff without learning it.

I'm pretty sure chatgpt just tells you how it works, so they probably just memorized what it said.

Exactly my thought