I believe LLMs got so hyped because they felt like a big shortcut. Anyone can understand that building world models to a level that would actually revolutionize artificial intelligence is damn near impossible, just as neurosymbolic AI is hard because it has to be actually robust and has to follow the rules. It requires very hard work. Building true artificial intelligence is extremely difficult. We knew this before the current AI hype.
LLMs felt like cheating because it initially just seemed to "grow" and develop "emergent" capabilities. I am fairly certain this is why many people got so hooked on the idea. It felt like: "Maybe we don't actually have to do it the hard way. We can just make it bigger and it will probably start evolving by itself".
LLMs are, as was apparent quite early on, just an illusion of intelligence by means of scaling a quite simple concept to an absurd degree. It's sad to me that even the brilliant people working on these technologies sort of just ignored these facts and instead got high on the "what if?"