I don't think people has refused to learn C (which is not particularly hard to learn for someone who knows about assembly and various other languages at the time). A lot of compilers were buggy and people have lots of assembly snippets for particular routines. And that's not counting mature projects that was already in assembly and you have to maintain. A lot of programmers are actually fine trying new stuff out, but some are professionals and don't bring everything under the sun in their work projects.
You're missing the point. People refused to learn it not because it was technically challenging but because it was a transformation. It happens with every increase in abstraction; folks fall by the wayside because they don't want change.
The same thing is happening with LLMs. If anything, the gap is far smaller than between assembly and C, which only serves to prove my point. People who don't understand it or like it could easily experience massive productivity gains with a minimum of effort. But they probably never will, because their mindset is the limiting factor, not technical ability.
It really comes down to neural plasticity and willingness to adapt. Some people have it, some people don't. It's pretty polarizing, because for the people that don't want change it becomes an emotional conversation rather than a logical one.
What's the opportunity cost of properly exploring LLMs and learning what everybody else is talking about? Near zero. But there are plenty of people who haven't yet.
I have, and it's not amazing. I'm pretty sure a lot of people have and agree with me. Why ask an LLMs when I can just open an API reference and have all the answers in a dense and succint format that gives me what I need?
Let's say I'm writing and Eloquent query (Laravel's ORM) and I forgot the signature for the where method. It's like 5 seconds to find the page and have the answer (less if I'm using Dash.app). It would take me longer to write a prompt for that. And I have to hope the model got it right.
For bigger use cases, a lot of times I already know the code, the reason I haven't written it yet is I'm thinking how it would impact the whole project architecture. Once I have a good feel, writing the code is a nice break from all of those thinking sessions. Like driving on a scenic route. Yeah you could have an AI drive you there, but not when you're worrying it taking the wrong turn at every intersection.