Problem is, that ai usage has a negative image for various reasons.
Which means, it comes to the point that people treat it, like vegans treat animal products.
And the enthusiastic vibe coders and ai agent users are spoiling perception of ai for indie games even more.
Add to this, that ai is constantly in the news with yet another security issue and companies are pushing it to their employees, people losing their jobs because of ai, companies losing money because they switched to ai and billions spent for a tech where it is unclear who pays the bills for that. The money has to come from somewhere, and if you spend billions on machines, that means it is not spent on humans.
Some people focus on the method, while they should focus on the outcome. They argue about things like "stealing" for ai training data. But that's shortsighted and trivial, as you point out. "Stealing" is how it has always been: we rely on other people's work.
But the outcome would be the same, no matter how ai is built. It replaces humans in things that are essential to being human.