And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The “over” in “over-reliance” is a subjective value judgment and I just don’t agree.

I’m not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There’s nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?

John Henry died in the process of “beating” the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it’d be considered foolish to do that work by hand.