I don't see a decrease in critical thinking. Especially with AI it got more important to think critically about the solutions offered. So I would rather argue critical thinking will be more important and practiced. But wait, is this the pope in a gucci jacket on the photo? Can it be? No, right? Let's find out!
Critical Thinking is MORE important however it's much easier (lower friction, lower effort) to just use AI instead of thinking critically leading to cognitive offloading and atrophying because we stop using critical thinking for mundane tasks.
The Microsoft study [1] also mentioned in the blog shows exactly this effect with LLM usage correlated with critical thinking atrophying.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...