It's because they fetishize arcane knowledge and LLMs make all their arcane knowledge easy. That's all it is. If I wanted to go make my own NES game from scratch 2 years ago it would have taken months of full time work, and I would have had to learn a lot of new things, and most likely would have joined and participated in that community. Now I can do it this afternoon. I'm not going to because it's pointless now, you can't show it off, you can't impress anyone with it, and the result is not just economically worthless, it's worthless in every way.

So of course they are upset by it, it's annoying to spend years building up some skill and then end up being less capable at applying that skill than a 12 year old with a claude code subscription who has never even seen a CRT. Their entire hobby community is going to fundamentally change and the people who are influential and knowledgeable now are effectively has-beens who will have to learn totally new skills to stay relevant and most likely won't have the energy, or desire, and lets be frank the aptitude to learn those skills. (I don't mean the skill of using an LLM, they can do that and almost certainly would be great at it, I mean skills like charisma and presentation and promotion.)