Take all that you think and say about self driving cars and apply it to an ATC. The ATC job is probably an order of magnitude more automatable.
Again I think something that would resolve this question quite easily would be a game that covers the domain.
You can actually get a game that covers ~98% of what cars have to deal with. This would be something like GTA V
This game looks very low budget and simplistic. Perhaps with higher budget one could get to 99.9% and then one would have a proper simulation of the jobs of ATCs.
Then you hook in your AI prove that it can perform. Then you replace 99.9% of the human ATCs with this AI.
When one read the acronym "AI", should be replaced with the synonym "statistics", which shows how contradictory about redundancy and accuracy can be the people who ate the marketing about these algorithms, and are thinking about to replace real trained intelligence, humans in this case, with it.
I dont mean AI here as in NN or LLM I mean like the traditional AI like you would find in an RTS.
But the proof is always in the pudding. I highly suspect that someone could write an AI that could play "Flight Controls" and play it flawlessly. So what does this prove? Well it proves that 98% of the work of the ATC can be automated.
Again I think something that would resolve this question quite easily would be a game that covers the domain. You can actually get a game that covers ~98% of what cars have to deal with. This would be something like GTA V