Is mathematics research even a job you pursue if survival is the question?

I guess a lot of highly intelligent people relied on their smarts to coast to tenure and then all the way to retirement.

Ultimately AI spend has been one of the largest infusions of funding into the small academic mathematics community in years. Just raw token spend alone probably dwarves whatever research budget increases have gone to that field in the past 5 years. That should tell you something about the economic value of that line of work