It’s honestly a bit of both. Creativity can be expressed in the intermediate steps in order to provide a subjectively superior approach (durably optimal until someone identifies a better approach), but fundamentally the design goal is “achieve X with minimal risk and waste”. That’s the part where I agree with you: gatekeeping an outcome is dumb. That said, the expressions of those intermediate steps genuinely land in the territory of creativity. That’s how we end up with new algorithms. Creativity is how we arrive at the optimal algorithms.

Even so, gatekeeping those intermediate techniques is bad for the same reasons as gatekeeping the end state. If they can be independently arrived at (like flourishes that personalize a recipe or alter it for particular food pairings), the end result is still stifling innovation and closing access to the tools everyone has access to.

Edit: Ultimately I think this means everyone should have access, unequivocally. The problem is that LLMs are financially gatekept and implemented at environmentally predatory scales, with unregulated supply chain bottlenecks that choke out the more environmentally friendly and consumer accessible tech that was in the pipeline.

Coding is a creative task, there are many many many solutions to any problem, and some problems are a lot more abstract to where even the problem can be different for different people. Like if there's a problem with the users interacting with part of the software, you could try to make it easier to interact with, have a little tutorial, decorate it, make it look good, you know, a form of art, you could also try to make it more intuitive, also a form of art. It's not typically what you'd think about, but coding is a rather creative task and everyone has different ways to go about problems, and those different ways are the different styles of programming people have.