Not to sound bleak, but you're describing what things looked like to me 18 months ago. The C-suite's gonna keep pulling that ladder up until the loss of layers of knowledge come back to bite them in the ass in six years. If it ever does.
I'm not the best person to talk to, because I'm not a salaried programmer for some corporation, and I'm not looking for a job from a startup or something. I'm in a unique position where I wrote a suite of proprietary software that clients pay for that they would have a hard time replicating or migrating away from, even if AI helped them. Lucky me, I happened to get into a specialized industry and start writing code for it 20 years ago, and I kept all the data and code logic in my own silos and never shared anything with anyone. So I am somewhat protected because it would cost 3x more to replace what I wrote than to just pay me for the rest of my life to maintain what I built.
By the way, I started this software in my 20s when my body was already being destroyed by physical jobs. I started it while I was driving a taxi and waiting tables at the same time. I learned by reading books in my cab. I don't think that's an option for people anymore.
My best friend worked for a massive multinational similar to Salesforce and he ran a team of 60 people under him until last year. He was not AI-proof. They laid off everyone on his team except for him and 3 helpers, and told him to use AI to do everything else. After awhile, they laid him off too. After interviewing for a couple months, he found a new job, and his job is to manage two people running AIs. It was a 30% pay cut and he feels lucky to have it.
Under any external hierarchy, where I didn't have this lifetime of private code and clients in my pocket, his job would have been way, way above mine. I would have been one of the 60 people laid off.
Okay, so I'm going to say something about this "knowledge work" thing because I've known a lot of people who took courses and transitioned to it from the trades. Almost all of them did not get decent jobs. One of them was a bartender who just somehow got it. This was around 2018. Her husband works in construction. She just sat down and it clicked, she learned to write javascript in 3 months. I'd sit at her bar and tell her what to improve and she'd write it down and memorize it. In six months she was writing like a native, and she got a job at [huge multinational retail company] working on their website. And somehow she survived round after round of layoffs to keep going and become the only person left on her team. I'm immensely proud of her. And she will still probably lose her job in the next six months.
But my ex-girlfriend tried to learn to code at exactly the same time, and it went nowhere. Just didn't make sense to her.
So that's why I wouldn't recommend it. Honestly, if I didn't have the little pile of code I was sitting on that pays my bills, I would go to school to be a plumber or air conditioning specialist, or to repair helicopters or be a car mechanic. That's basically what I do anyway, I just do it in code instead of parts. At one time, what I did was equivalent to building custom cars and engines, only in code. At this point, fixing a car would be more satisfying. No one's paying to build their hot rod in code anymore, that's all being thrown at AI. And the rest of the jobs suck.