They're a massive and combinatorially exploding part of the equation, though.

Imagine a world where instead of using AI to undermine writers and artists, we use it to explode their output. A writer could write the details that make a character unique, and the key and side quest dialogs that they write now, which could be used to customize a model for that character.

The player can now have realistic conversations with those characters that would make everything better. You could ask for directions to something and then follow it up with more questions that the NPC should know the answer to. Etc.

Now inconsequential filler characters, like a ramen shop owner in the example, become something potentially memorable but explicitly useful in a way that could never possibly be hand crafted.

This article is shitting on an incredible early attempt to allow for this by taking the fact that it's not done yet and crossing that with their biased opining and producing a kotaku-style click bait from it.