What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them.

Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.

Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.

It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.