> The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science
It is not science, which is the study of the natural world. You are using the word "science" as an honorific, meaning something like "useful technical work that I think is impressive".
The reason you are so confused is that you can't distinguish studying the natural world from engineering.
LLMs certainly aren't science. But there is a "science of LLMs" going on in, e.g., the interpretability work by Anthropic.