The charm of Eliza is that it was simply a Rogerian therapist who didn't try to be intelligent.
Eliza's talent was in getting you to express yourself, free from inhibition. That doesn't require “intelligence”, but it does require the art of listening. There's nothing dumb about that.
Sure, the overall technique of asking vague open-ended questions to elicit a response might not be dumb. But it's hard to argue that ELIZA-style chatbots are intelligent in anyway. They deliberately had no understanding at all.
Eliza's talent was in getting you to express yourself, free from inhibition. That doesn't require “intelligence”, but it does require the art of listening. There's nothing dumb about that.