USB-C and usb 2/3 are not the same thing. You can have a standards compliant USB-C port shape that delivers USB2 speeds which is what the non-pro has and a USB-C port that implements USB3 which is what the pro has. What arstechnica says is that in bot cases for the Pro and non-pro Apple delivered a standard usb implementation with no additional proprietary requirements
Code created by a LLM still needs to be interpreted and understood by a human so it can be made useful in a software development context. So yeah the article is exaggerating the impact of AI for coding I think, in my opinion it will become yet another tool at a developer’s disposal to speed up their work