No, it's not about flashiness. Those ML apps you are talking about were specialised projects, each one developed independently. LLMs on the other hand are generalist. They can do thousands of known tasks and countless more, including combinations of tasks.

Instead of taking one year or more to provide a proof of concept, you can do that in a week. Instead of painstakingly labelling tens of thousands of examples, you just prompt with 4 examples. The entry barrier is so low now for many applications that anyone with programming experience can do it.

For vision, the CLIP model gives us a way to make classifiers without any samples, and the diffusion models allow us to generate any image. All without retraining, without large scale labelling.