We do know what happens at higher abstraction levels; the design of efficient networks, and the steady beat of SOTA improvements all depend on understanding how LLMs work internally: choice of network dimensions, feature extraction, attention, attention heads, caching, the peculiarities of high-dimensions and avoiding overfitting are all well-understood by practitioners. Anthropomorphization is only necessary in pop-science articles that use a limited vocabulary.
IMO, there is very little mystery, but lots of deliberate mysticism, especially about future LLMs - the usual hype-cycle extrapolation.