Search frictions are real lots of bad candidates clog up the market and your assessment process/ other things might not be getting who you need in the door.
Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation. People can demand a completely comfortable illusion of life and enforce this sterility.
I think you underestimate the price by a few orders of magnitude where it makes sense to pay a model instead of a human. If someone earning 200,000 a year gets replaced by paying 500 a day to Anthropic or OpenAI their employer comes out ahead.
Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
You seem to be saying model capabilities aren't improving. They are. The fact that many mathematicians have looked at the result and confirmed it and solved some other problems with the technique elevates this above claims.