Yeah, the junior dev analogy misses on the core capabilities. The ability to spit out syntactically correct blocks of code in a second or two is a massive win, even if it requires careful review.
Yup, it's been a help for me. Had a buddy who asked me if I could automate his workflow in wordpress for post submissions he had to deal with. I asked chatgpt with a little prodding to create me a little workflow. I cleaned it up a bit and threw it in AWS lambda for literally 0$. He was super thankful and hooked me up with a bunch of meat (his dad is a butcher) and I spent maybe an hour on it.