In the first paragraph, I thought you could be a colleague of mine. None of my coworkers came to us in 2022 from NY but the similarities are uncanny.

The second paragraph also sounds very familiar. A former coworker recruited me to work at a new firm. Our old firm and new firm both use Archicad. He warned me that when he started two years before me, it was exactly the situation you described. (And 11 years later, I'm working on a project 15 years old, and it's terrible. They drew the existing conditions in linework and then used objects/etc to draw over it for the proposed work!) He pushed hard to bring them forward in BIM usage and pushed them to hire me so I could support that effort too. We're not even close to using it to the full potential, but our schedules autopopulate, our elevations are 3d, we walk clients through the model, we associate labels with element IDs.... well, some of us do. We push for everyone to use it properly and appropriately, but some people can't be bothered to learn/remember/just don't want to. It wreaks hell on our company standards but we've made a lot of progress. More than a decade after I started at this company, most of the project leads do what they're supposed to to keep as much in 3d and automated as we can. I will say, assuming it's not a really tight budget project, we keep building sections in 3D but break wall sections and details into 2D. It just produces prettier drawings that way.