Kind of a false dichotomy. A great example is debuggers vs print statements. Some people get by just fine with print statements, others lean heavily on debuggers. Another example is IDE vs plain vIM.

Becoming obsolete is a fear of people who are not willing or able to learn arbitrary problem domains in a short amount of time. In that case learning to use a particular tool will only get you so far. The real skill is being able to learn quickly (enthusiasm helps).

So, "useless or dangerous tools" is not a self contradictory sentence.

Gas powered pogo sticks, shoe fitting X-ray, Radium flavored chocolates, Apollo LLTV, table saws, Flex Seal for joining two halves of boats together, exorbitantly parallelized x86 CPU, rackable Mac Pro with M1 SoC, image generation AI, etc.

Tools can be useless, or be even dangerous.

AI tools fall onto the category of just in time learning. No, even semi-competent, software engineer is going to become obsolete because they don't know the newest and most hyped AI tool. And anyone stupid enough to hire on that basis isn't worth working for.

How processors work, cache and memory work, how the browser works, data structure and algorithms, even design patterns are all important foundationaly knowledge. How to tell an AI to shit out some code or answer a question definitely isn't.