Are these great $20/hr support engineers the kind I often deal with over email or phone, who usually employ canned responses, can’t solve off-script problems, tend to repeat the same unhelpful responses, and are sometimes indistinguishable from bots?

Those are $9.25 an hour support agents who are paid mostly to get you off the phone and take 70 calls a day.

Or their $10.25 an hour tier 3 "supervisors" who you might escalate the call to.

Look towards Shopify Support Gurus. Paid well, fully remote. As a Shopify Partner I deal with them a lot and have never had a bad experience; while some can't always answer my question, I always speak to a human (24/7 via live chat) and they direct my query in the right direction.

Support is also one of the most remote friendly forms of work available, and often benefits from spreading workers over multiple time zones.

Much of customer support is like the close doors button on an elevator. It doesn't actually do anything, but makes you feel like it does.

It's much more expensive than not having it.

Back of the napkin math for 1 billion users and a 1:100 support staff ratio comes out to around 5.8 billion dollars/yr.

This is developer support, not user support.