The article links to the "no copy?" site: http://www.kameli.net/nocopy/ which was highly influential in its own time... Demos are ultimately about impressing, also copying without being seen as copying - if you literally copy/paste other people's stuff, that makes you "lame", but if you quote/reference it, if you one-up it - if your rivals put out a demo with 200 bobs, you put out one with 240 bobs - then you look co…
Yes. Of course, there's plenty of skill to be developed in photographing, too.
And nowadays there's still plenty of skill left in coercing our limited AI generation tools to produce passable pictures, yet alone great ones. (But the field is evolving so far, that the achievements that still require skill constantly evolve, and the skills required also still shift.)