This is a refreshing perspective because recently I feel like I’m surrounded by people who think they can effectively implement complex software, just by hammering the best models.
It has been hard to explain that they are in fact just creating toy versions and there is no way they can do it without learning the underlying architecture. But they just keep going wasting 100s of dollars , lost in a sea of bugs
Until a few years ago I'd have been the person who thought you could make a text-to-CAD system scale up to all of it. And then I tried to make stuff I wanted.
Dabbled with OpenSCAD as we will. I decided to learn FreeCAD and what I discovered is that, even putting aside FreeCAD's many documented issues, parametric GUI CAD is not an imprecise, clumsy or fiddly way to work.
It is expressive, precise, generally capable of all the things that code-CAD can do and much more, and it's much, much quicker to work in, once you've learned a few core principles.
As you say, there is an underlying architecture; it's not just a sort of 3D paint package.
The problems the text-as-whatever crowd have are all Dunning-Kruger things in the truest sense.
People who are unaware they are unskilled in a particular technology are unlikely to successfully replace it with another. Particularly one that requires describing the problem domain in precise language.
Quite often when you see text-to-CAD discussions, especially here, there's evidence of profound misunderstandings from the people who think they are going to automate it. They assume their frustrations with the tools stem from limitations of the tools, not from the limits of their understanding.
As a person with decades of experience of code I have found learning how to use LLMs effectively to be much, much harder than learning CAD.