It depends. A lot of it is hard to parse out from company specific realities. These particular intermediates are only doing so much support as the product is selling a lot more than anticipated. We may be allocated support engineers to help out. So maybe support engineer becomes the new junior developer job as many of them are fairly technical but have no career track.

The current situation is definitely untenable, but it is not clear whether you need a full fledged developer do a lot of the work they are presently doing.

Keep in mind that this is a fairly large org of thousands, so smaller companies have different needs as full time support engineers may not be worth it. We already have some, they just are not allocated to this team.

As for your second question, one company phrased it something along the lines of "AI allows us to quickly do tasks for which we would otherwise need junior/certain classes of support team members." AI isn't just being used by developers, but all over the org. There is an AI steering group and everything.

Other employer hasn't said anything about it as AI implementation is less far along.