I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
I’d prefer to pay for the senior and fire the less senior - the implicit premium is to not have to worry about the lack of fundamentals for when problems need to be solved that are nuanced.
Although I feel the value of what you're saying, I don't feel that's the mindset in the whole world.
I live in a LATAM country and I have worked for both EU (which outsourced most of the workforce, usually keeping the architects and rotating the devs (PS: pre-agentic coding)), US and now US with LATAM intermediator.
Every single one of them treated blattantly different less senior and low paid workers. EU treated so well their EU employees that even outsourced workers could actually feel as real human beings.
The US (startup) one was extremely crushing, I feel seniors were rewarded, what I take from your "the implicit premium", true, but with so much damn pressure. The only senior I saw departed was out of exhaustion, a team from 10 engineers reduced to 4 or 5, don't remember exactly.
While LATAM people is just awful. The slavery mindset is always dormant. Keep pushing, replace when exhausted, hire a whole new crew of low-paid people and push them to burn-out, that's true on small businesses and giant banks. I remember I once trained 3 interns in a pre-agentic setting, I had to push for 2 whole years so that one of the well trained, extremely dedicated and intelligent guy got hired. And he was hired only after a YEAR that the other one had been hired by a larger company. After I was gone, they kept me around consulting just some hours a week and refused to replace even the "half" me. And then I was gone. Only after some months of my departure they really hired the intelligent dude I've mentioned before and for at least a year and a half they coudln't find a replacement for the almost-slave as I was because the intelligent dude probably was starting to get used with agentic coding with a fifth of our total salaries. I haven't heard of that so far.