I agree. In many cases it's probably easier for a developer to become more of a product person, than for a product person to become a dev. Even with LLM's you still need to have some technical skills & be able to read code to handle technical tasks effectively.

Of course things might look different when the product is something that requires really deep domain knowledge.

Or architects, someone has to draw the nice diagrams and spec files for the robots.

However, like in automated factories, only a small percentage is required to stay around.

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive! e.g. a T-shaped product engineer on one side and a T-shaped SRE on the other. Both will kind of compact what used to be multiple roles/responsibilities together. The good news (and my prediction) IMO is the engineering won't be going away as much as the other roles.