You don't actually have to take peoples word for it, read epoch.ai developments, look into the benchmark literature, look at ARC-AGI...
That's where the skepticism comes in, because one side of the discussion is hyping up exponential growth and the other is seeing something that looks more logarithmic instead.
I realize anecdotes aren't as useful as numbers for this kind of analysis, but there's such a wide gap between what people are observing in practice and what the tests and metrics are showing it's hard not to wonder about those numbers.