As someone who works with lots of analysts, I can guarantee that they also don't make the correct interpretations all the time, and that you have to sense-check the results back against reality.
In either case, validation is the key step - you can't just trust that your SQL query is correct regardless of if you have manually written it, you still have to go through the data and check it.
That's where the SQL generation stuff can save time - if 50% of the time you can get to an answer in half the time, then it's great! Normally in my experience with current-gen LLM's when they fail they fail quickly, so the other 50% of queries don't take twice as long to write manually.
Then there is the other use case - if you aren't sure why a particular SQL query is erroring, these LLM's are great at telling you why and fixing your code.
In either case, validation is the key step - you can't just trust that your SQL query is correct regardless of if you have manually written it, you still have to go through the data and check it.
That's where the SQL generation stuff can save time - if 50% of the time you can get to an answer in half the time, then it's great! Normally in my experience with current-gen LLM's when they fail they fail quickly, so the other 50% of queries don't take twice as long to write manually.
Then there is the other use case - if you aren't sure why a particular SQL query is erroring, these LLM's are great at telling you why and fixing your code.