As a former traditional machine vision researcher, currently robotics-adjacent software engineer, I agree, but: they've been brandishing that shotgun for a pretty long time before it became standard issue, for varying reasons. To continue your analogy, I'm pretty sure the (pseudo-)reasoning ability of GPT4-level LLMs could solve a lot of hard robotic problems (perception ambiguity, external agent behavior prediction etc), but now it's a stationary missile silo, and we need this weapon on every APC to be a solution.
Neural network people: watch this space, I have a shotgun.