It's true that it's less satisfying and less attractive, but these subjective adjectives are based on relevant objective truths, namely that LLMs are difficult or impossible to analyze from the outside, and at a coarse level they're the knowledge equivalent of pathological functions. Calling them "intelligent" is to privilege a very limited definition of the word, while ignoring all of the other things that we normally associate with it.
I don't want us to make an AGI or anything like it for both humanist and economic reasons, but if we make one, I think it's very likely that it has to have more internal structure than do LLMs, even if we do not explicitly force a given structure to be there.
(I am not an expert.)