You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.
It may not manifest as job loss yet, but the market response to changes is a whole other thing. For one, it's likely to first manifest as slowing down hiring relative to amount of projects being started and then released. Software is a growing market after all.
With AI, there's no real expertise involved in saying "well, it was very stupid 5 years ago, now it's starting to seem smart, if we extrapolate it's going to be smarter than me in 5 years." But no one really knows what level of effort is required to make it smarter than me. No one is an expert in something that doesn't exist yet.
You might seek comfort in your conspiracy theories, but back in the real world the likes of me were already quite capable of creating complete and fully working projects from scratch using yesterday's LLMs.
We are talking about afternoons where you grab your coffee, saying to yourself "let's see what this vibecode thing is all about", and challenging yourself to create projects from scratch using nothing but a definition of done, LLM prompts, and a free-tier LLM configured to run in agent mode.
What, then?
You then can proceed to nitpick about code quality and bugs, but I can also say the same thing about your work, which you take far longer to deliver.