Did everyone suddenly forget how much white-collar work used to be described as bullshit?

Before LLMs, Reddit was full of people saying corporate work was fake, bloated, and pointless. Bullshit meetings. PowerPoint decks nobody reads. Managers who do nothing. Coworkers who somehow survive for years while barely working. People pretending to be busy. Etc. This was not some fringe opinion. It was everywhere. A lot of white-collar workers openly admitted that huge parts of office life were performative. But now that AI might threaten those same jobs, suddenly the story has changed.