Your reading of the addiction angle is much different than mine.
I didn't hear the author criticizing the character of their colleagues. On the contrary, they wrote a whole section on how folks are pressured or forced to use AI tools. That pressure (and fear of being left behind) drives repeated/excessive exposure. That in turn manifests as dependence and progressive atrophy of the skills they once had. Their colleagues seem aware of this as evidenced by "what followed in most of them, almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine". When you're dependent on something, you can always find a 'reason'/excuse to use. AA and other programs talk about this at length without morally condemning addicts or assigning individual blame.
> For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for drinking, and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct. We had made the invention of alibis a fine art. [...] We had to drink because at work we were great successes or dismal failures. We had to drink because our nation had won a war or lost a peace. And so it went, ad infinitum. We thought "conditions" drove us to drink, and when we tried to correct these conditions and found that we couldn't to our entire satisfaction, our drinking went out of hand
Framing something as addictive does not necessarily mean that those suffering from it are failures/weak/immoral but you seem to have projected that onto the author.
Their other analogy ("brainworm") is similar. Something that no-one would willingly sign up for if presented with all the facts up front but that slips in and slowly develops into a serious issue. Faced with mounting evidence of the problem, folks have a strong incentive to downplay the issue because it's cognitively uncomfortable and demands action. That's where the "harmful coping" comes in: minimizing the severity of the problem, avoiding the topic when possible, telling yourself or others stories about how you're in control or things will work out fine, etc.