Absolutely. Juniors aren't a temporary stage of the industry that we can optimize away. They're where the next generation of senior engineers, architects, technical leaders, and mentors comes from.
I do think what we expect them to learn becomes even more important in an AI-assisted world, though.
It isn't enough to teach someone "here's how you implement authentication" or "here's how you query a database." They need to understand why we're doing it that way, what assumptions we're making, what can go wrong, and what else they should be thinking about while doing it.
Then AI becomes much more useful.
A junior can ask AI to implement something and look at the result with enough understanding to ask, "Is this actually right?" More importantly, they can start asking, "What happens if this fails?", "What about concurrent requests?", "What assumptions did this make?", or "What didn't we test?"
Without that foundation, a green test suite or working demo can easily become the definition of correct simply because the output looks convincing.
So yes, I'd absolutely give juniors a chance. But I'd invest heavily in teaching them how to reason about software, not just how to produce it. Syntax and implementation are increasingly cheap. Understanding why something works, recognizing when it doesn't, and knowing what questions to ask are becoming more valuable, not less.
And someday we're going to need senior developers. The only known source of those still seems to be junior developers. :)