Engineered labour
Humans were engineered as a labour force.
Atrahasis does say people were made to bear the gods' work — but from clay, spit and the blood of a slain god, in a ritual of birth, not a laboratory.
The half that is accurate
Ancient-astronaut writing is right that Mesopotamian myth makes humanity a workforce. Atrahasis is explicit and unsentimental about it: the junior gods refuse the canals, and people are created to take over the baskets. Compared with creation stories that put humanity at the summit of things, this is a bleak and unusual premise, and it deserves the attention it gets.
The half that is imported
The word 'engineered' does the smuggling. The text describes slaughter, clay, spittle, incantation, a birthing brick, fourteen goddesses and a ten-month gestation. Every element belongs to the vocabulary of childbirth and ritual craft. Reading genetics into it requires assuming that the scribes were describing a technology they lacked words for, which is unfalsifiable and unnecessary.
Why the reading appeals
It converts a strange story into a familiar one. A workforce made by biotechnology is a scenario modern readers already know from fiction; a workforce midwifed out of god-flesh and river mud is genuinely alien. The theory is not too imaginative but not imaginative enough — it trades the actual strangeness of the text for a science-fiction plot.