Flip side - AI code generation makes developing small ‘throw away’ tools for niche problems trivial. There are plenty of niche tasks for which there are no existing software tools. Writing your own via vibe coding - i did this myself for a temporal disk space calculation tool. In an hour. Including walking across the street to grab a coffee, and checking it in to github. Previously this would have been a few hours of searching the internet before writing something myself with less features and more bugs in 3-4x the time.
Some of the more tech knowledgeable are relying on smartphones and tablets too, if they fit their needs. The days of needing a desktop or laptop for general purpose tasks are pretty much over. Unless you're an IT guy, gamer or need some high end engineering or media production apps - you could probably get by with a tablet with far less PC janitor work.
Yup, can confirm core audio was still running and draining battery at 15% CPU usage. Thought it was a macOS bug on my new MacBook Pro 14", but it looks like it was a Zoom issue.