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The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.
The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.
I agree. Stuff like that always weirds me out. Presumably we all want someone to hang the sheet rock, clean the toilets, or wait our tables. I can completely understand the person saying "Why doesn't this person want more from their life?" but really that question is "why doesn't this person want to do a job that is more exclusive." Well, getting fulfillment from having a job that requires very specific and exclusive skill sets is a huge privilege. There are by definition going to be a lot of people who are kind of average (or kind of below average) at almost everything. They me need a job that is easy (intellectually) or requires micromanagement or direction. Who cares? If you want those jobs to be done you should want the person does them to have a dignified life. Also many of these jobs do benefit from some type of talent which isn't universal. I'm pretty great at building financial models, but I've never made my bathroom sparkle like a professional cleaner can, even if I spend way more time. They do have a skill set and develop techniques, learn the best cleaning products, and know the right tool for the job. Good for them.
Obviously people with the lowest common denominator skill sets will get paid less, but anyone doing productive labor is almost certainly a net benefit to society and 100% worthy of dignity and respect.
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