No the issue is you never paid attention before, have no idea how this works, but have been socially engineered to believe by some partisan influencer you inexplicably trust that this is suddenly a new big problem.
It's a lot more reliable than thermostats, but you are right this just an extension of existing demand response technology, which has served as an integral component of grid management for at least >40 years.
This is ultimately a trivial problem to solve. It consists of a few lines of code to quantify what you care about (your backup/emergency needs, cycling wear and tear, time of day, etc) and set compensation you require to mitigate those concerns.
Its financially great for customers. They can chose to opt in or not if that price meets their threshold. Ideally it would be structured in such a way that they are compensated for the reserve capacity (kW) that they hold available and the energy delivered (kWh) when that capacity is requested. The only missing step is for them to name their price and suddenly this is how the electricity market operates.
Are they really banking on the costs dropping? Surely they need to make up for the hundreds of billions already spent and (and trillions more they speak of) It seems likely that the frontier LLM AI business plan is to heavily subsidize our addiction and or overreliance on these tools and then leverage this relationship to extract whatever revenue is necessary. Or it will collapse and shareholders will lose a lot of money. I read recently that the major firms' spending on AI is increasing much faster than their revenues from other services allow and they are increasingly moving into debt financing that is linked into private equity and the banking system, possibly leading to broader economic problems should the business plan fail.
What's the plan for overcoming the economic problem of cheap renewables and batteries? Trade protectionism/market authoritarianism and just accepting high costs? Do you have any evidence suggesting the risk-adjusted costs of alternatives is more than nuclear, as you claim they are?
rule of thumb? you quote basic thermophysical properties? I've never in my life heard them referred to as rules of thumb. Does the lack of precision make it so?
I've taught on the order of 500 US stem students (2005-2013) and the majority, probably around 80% are the same as the Chinese majority engineers you describe. Uncurious people, not particularly interested in science or technology, or critical thinking. In fact I would bet a plurality or close to it were first generation college students, probably didn't want to get their hands dirty like their parents. Americans engineers are not exceptional.