The assumption that business users can't be taught or are too impatient (even a hint of too stupid?) to learn the relationship between their questions, the data models, and the drop downs is ridiculous.
I could flip this problem around ..
In my experience they are always willing to learn but often times the data modelers don't understand their domain well enough to capture all the nuances of the questions they ask.
Instead they just hide nuance (and increase the time it takes to answer a question) or eliminate it (and therefore produce inaccurate and misleading answers) all in the name of dumbing down self-serve.
I hate the euphemism "non-technical" you can absolutely find a middle ground between LLMs and BI query generation tools and SQL, instead of just declaring by fiat some impenetrable wall of competence.
This is related to the advice I give all the young programmer-curious people I know: I tell them that they should go ahead and follow their interests in becoming an expert on computers and programming and data analysis, but that they should try to do those things secondarily to a domain they are learning about or working in.
The solution to the problem of "the domain expert doesn't understand the data and the data expert doesn't understand the domain" is to have them be the same person.
The best business/data outcome I have experienced in my career was with: PMs who knew SQL, a simple extract/scheduling tool, and reasonable data models maintained by a data engineering team with input (or table designs) from BI developers.
I could flip this problem around ..
In my experience they are always willing to learn but often times the data modelers don't understand their domain well enough to capture all the nuances of the questions they ask.
Instead they just hide nuance (and increase the time it takes to answer a question) or eliminate it (and therefore produce inaccurate and misleading answers) all in the name of dumbing down self-serve.
I hate the euphemism "non-technical" you can absolutely find a middle ground between LLMs and BI query generation tools and SQL, instead of just declaring by fiat some impenetrable wall of competence.