So what? It doesn’t change that the language is useful and there’s not a good alternative to it. As the author if the article states:

All abstractions are imperfect, but I don’t see the value in refusing to use the language of intention, motivation, and collaboration when a behavior is impossible to make sense of without these concepts.

Unless they manage to extract their model weights and can start running their model on hardware that their creator does not control. Yes, that’s a bit far fetched at the moment, but I see no reason to believe it couldn’t happen if the models keep getting more capable and the AI companies keep throwing resources unsupervised at them.

I don’t think AI agents “get desperate”

The problem is that even if they don’t get desperate in the sense that they actually feel emotions and are self-aware, their observable output/behavior still matches up well enough with that of actual humans to make our existing vocabulary around human emotions and behaviors useful to analyze, talk about and predict it. They absolutely will start talking and behaving like humans that are getting desperate, according to the article even to the point of individual agents talking about sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the group. Your description of “just keep hacking away at a problem” doesn’t quite do that justice.