This is an excellent point. A sibling comment of yours called it ossification. There hasn’t been much innovation or change in Instruction Set Architectures, and there can’t be as the entire world of software relies on these. Only true disruption, such as ARM is for x86, can very slowly change that. So with that in mind it seems plausible that for example pandas becomes the ossified, low level standard high-level code “compiles” down to. I’m sure tons of such API wrappers already exist, but AI might make it so that we truly never need to interact with the lower layers. We wouldn’t care if it was pandas or something else. I personally am not bullish on that. If at all, this is still a decade out at least, and there’s always demand for people working at all layers of the stack. Languages like C and beyond didn’t fully alleviate the need for Assembly engineering.

In fact, in some sense, the number of Assembly engineers might not have decreased at all, aka wasn’t impacted. There were simply new avenues for new sorts of engineers to enter the field and start producing (C back then, web development today as the tech furthest removed from low levels).