I think that's a reasonable critique. The capitalism-versus-socialism framing can be useful for some questions, but it also compresses a much broader history of how humans have organized production, exchange, and governance.

For most of human history, people didn't live under anything we'd recognize as either "capitalism" or "socialism." They lived in societies characterized by combinations of:

• Kinship and reciprocal exchange.
• Gift economies.
• Common ownership of some resources alongside individual use of others.
• Tribute and taxation.
• Feudal obligations.
• Markets embedded within larger social and political institutions.

Historians and anthropologists such as Karl Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, Elinor Ostrom, and David Graeber all, in different ways, argue that modern ideological categories often obscure this diversity.

Even the term "capitalism" itself is relatively recent. While historians debate exactly when capitalism begins, most would place its mature form within the last few centuries. Likewise, "socialism" emerges as a self-conscious political movement in the nineteenth century. Against the backdrop of perhaps 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, these are indeed recent developments.

Where the framing does make sense is when the question is narrowly about modern industrial economies. If you're asking:

• Should healthcare be publicly or privately financed?
• How should prices be determined?
• What role should the state play in industry?

then comparing capitalist and socialist traditions is natural because those are the ideologies that have dominated debates over industrial economies since the nineteenth century.

Where it becomes limiting is when it gets treated as if those are the only conceivable ways to organize economic life. That overlooks a vast range of arrangements, including:

• Ostrom's polycentric governance of commons.
• Cooperative enterprises.
• Mutual aid networks.
• Indigenous systems of land stewardship.
• Mixed economies (which virtually every country today has).
• Historical merchant republics, guild systems, and other hybrid institutions.

Language models often reproduce the capitalism/socialism dichotomy because it is extraordinarily common in textbooks, journalism, political commentary, and online debate. They're responding to the distribution of ideas in their training data, not necessarily making the philosophical claim that these are the only meaningful categories.

One subtle point is that economists often use "markets" and "capitalism" almost interchangeably in casual discussion, even though they are distinct concepts. Markets predate capitalism by millennia. Likewise, states, planning, and commons management predate socialism by millennia. Conflating these concepts can make debates seem more binary than they really are.

So I think there's a legitimate criticism here: many discussions jump too quickly from "how should scarce resources be allocated?" to "capitalism or socialism?" without considering the much larger design space of institutions that humans have developed across history.