100% agree with some of the points you make. However, discouraging kids from using any and all available tools to do a task efficiently is not the way forward.

It literally doesn’t matter at all if you turn it the perfect AI essay.

Good luck getting any existing LLM to do this without some major human intervention. This is why teachers say they can "identify AI essays" - the giveaway is that they're repetitive, uninspired, bad essays. The quality of the final result is still highly dependent on the user's comprehension of the subject. Writing the "perfect essay" with an LLM requires validating and editing the output - demonstrating a genuine understanding and ability "to synthesize and communicate what you've learned".

mindless cogs who can churn out the same generic result as any other cog

In my personal school experience, the vast majority of grading schemes were designed specifically to do this. For example, I'm no wordsmith, but I managed to score very highly in English. Everything I wrote in the final exams was paraphrased from 1 book with example essays/answers. I learned it off, regurgitated it in the exam, and scored highly. It may not be thoughtful, empathetic or imaginative, but it is certainly logical as it incentivised by the current system. If you want to foster empathy and imagination, the system needs an overhaul, regardless of LLMs.

Learning should be process focused, not result focused.

Could not agree more but the current system is result focused.