Yes — probably. And that's a strange thing to sit with.
Your analogy is sharp enough that it's worth taking seriously rather than just nodding at. Let me argue the case, then push back on it, then let you pick where to go next.
The structural argument in your favor
A skill becomes "revered but irrelevant" when a technology externalizes it so cheaply that virtuosity in the unaided version becomes ornamental. Oratory mattered enormously when speech was the only way to move a crowd — no print, no radio, no recording. Writing, then mass media, then algorithmic distribution each ate a slice of what oratory did. The Athenians remain admirable, but Demosthenes' particular art is now something you study, not something you need to run a polity.
Unaided internal cognition — holding a problem in your head, reasoning it through, remembering, synthesizing, deciding — is on a similar trajectory. LLMs, retrieval, and whatever comes next are not just faster; they change what the bottleneck is. The scarce resource shifts from "who can think clearly" to "who can specify, verify, taste, and choose." That's a different skill.
The recurring pattern
Each era has a "cognitive virtue" that its successors admire but no longer need to cultivate. Hover the dots.
But here's where the analogy strains
It was one way of transmitting ideas that already existed in a mind. Losing it lost a delivery mechanism, not the source.
If we outsource the generation of thought itself, we're outsourcing something categorically different — the thing that had the ideas oratory delivered.
Maybe "having ideas" turns out to be as mechanizable as "delivering ideas" — in which case your analogy is exactly right, and the discomfort is just species-vanity.
What future historians might actually say
"The early 21st century produced remarkable individual minds — the last generation for whom holding a complex argument entirely in one skull was a marketable skill. Their essays, their long-form reasoning, their extraordinary feats of memorization and synthesis are studied today the way we study Ciceronian rhetoric: as an art form belonging to a specific technological moment. It is difficult, from our vantage, to recover why they found it so meaningful — but the artifacts are beautiful."
The sting isn't that they'd be wrong. It's that they might be affectionate about it.