> things I've used that seem to be better than they were
A bunch of things got obsolete with emergence of good LLMs, especially in research and working with text tasks. See usage graphs of Stackoverflow, Grammarly and others.
"Obsolete" is an incomplete characterization of the state of play.
LLMs put the information from StackOverflow into an arguably more helpful format, but they're still heavily dependent on human input. The LLM must periodically harvest info from human communities to stay up-to-date with technological progress. If those communities die, the LLM will not compensate, and other communities will arise to replace them. Those communities may have different attitudes towards the LLMs that killed their ancestors.
A bunch of things got obsolete with emergence of good LLMs, especially in research and working with text tasks. See usage graphs of Stackoverflow, Grammarly and others.