I find it highly suspect that someone can be a productive developer and find syntax to be a blocker. I've worked professionally in software for 20 years and I've yet to come across a developer I thought was good but kept forgetting what curly braces mean. It's like saying "he's a great writer, but he's illiterate."
I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems with kubernetes, and I will say this about architects: if they aren't immersed in the day to day code, they suck at their job. If you're too removed from the constraints you can't be effective at that job. I have however worked with "architects" that refused to get their hands dirty, and it was always miserable.
OK, I think "syntax" might mean different things to different people.
I'll give you an example: at one time I essentially re-implemented the behavior of a WeakMap in JS because I didn't know that the language feature existed. AI is much better at implicitly "knowing" these things because it can model the entire language and possible token-space much better than humans can. That is something I always struggled with; my long-term memory is not great.
I think that's very different from remembering how to write a basic function.
I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems with kubernetes, and I will say this about architects: if they aren't immersed in the day to day code, they suck at their job. If you're too removed from the constraints you can't be effective at that job. I have however worked with "architects" that refused to get their hands dirty, and it was always miserable.