I used to think the same way. But after spending the last few years getting frustrated trying to create more complex linguistic systems, e.g., dialog systems or scientific articles understanding, I am coming to the conclusion that the current statistical approach is a dead end. It’s actually impeding the field because it’s working so well for certain tasks that when people are trying to build systems with real understanding, they can’t match the performance obtained by gigantic language models. But the answer is not Chomsky, it’s semantic grounding in the real world rather than looking at language as a sequence of symbols.