As a matter of fact, commercial passenger service started almost immediately as the tech was out of the fiction phase. The airship were large, highly experimental, barely controllable, hydrogen-filled death traps that were marketed as luxurious and safe. First airliners also appeared with big engines and large planes (WWI disrupted this a bit). Nothing of that was built on solid grounds. The adoption was only constrained by the industrial capacity and cost. Most large aircraft were more or less experimental up until the 50's, and aviation in general was unreliable until about 80's.

I would say that right from the start everyone was pretty well aware about the unreliability of LLM-assisted coding and nobody was experimenting on unwitting people or forcing them to adopt it.

>Engineering at it's most basic is tricking physics into doing what you want.

Very well, then Mr Tinkleberry also passes the bar because it's exactly such a trick. That it irks you as a cheap hack that lacks rigor (which it does) is another matter.