Death by a thousand cuts sounds more believable. I concur with your position: instead of it being black-and-white, it could simply lead to less demand for engineers as the "building blocks" -- really common open source technologies with nearly omniscient presence -- are essentially commoditized.
On the other hand, I could also see a reality where, since many low-level problems are solved for you, management expects more out of you, so the number of engineers stays about the same, but you get a higher level of productivity.
