Isn't the classic QA role typically about finding bugs not necessarily fixing them?

Ok, but who do you think fixes the bugs? There must be countless devs out there who are slaves to fixing Jira tickets all day, so I still don't understand OP's assertion that full-time bug fixer isn't a thing.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like limits were increased and now they're just going back to the levels they were at before?

You're not missing anything. That's correct.

People are excused all the time for things because they are elevated in other areas. It's about their value as a whole and that's where we are with LLMs. They aren't perfect but they do plenty we can't which means they are worth using.