I think what's interesting in the jargon vs. plain definition tension here is related to what you noted in this most recent comment. It's that the words "neat" and "scruffy" - that is, just the english words, not the AI jargon terms - are not really symmetrical. A scruffy thing can easily become more neat while remaining scruffy, but introducing scruffiness into a neat thing tends to just make it scruffy. Neat is more totalizing.
So you say LLMs still fall into the "neat" camp - AI jargon this time - because of their mathematical core and lineage, and that's fair enough. But you also say that they incorporate "scruffy" techniques - jargon again - and I think that makes them - switching to the english words here - seem pretty scruffy, because the scruffy techniques are themselves scruffy, and incorporating all these different techniques is itself a scruffy thing to do.