You can rationalize it any way you want. I don't care what they capacity they have, or if they syntactically whatever, or any academic thing.
In practice, they work. That's all it matters.
I don't care if the code works because it was formed because of temporal understanding or if it works because an LLM predicted enough tokens correctly, I care that it works.
They don't have capacity to understand logical or temporal relationships, which is the core competency of coding.
They can form syntactically valid strings in a formal language, which isn't the same thing as coding.