If we assume the wildly pessimistic scenario of pilots starting to get paid as much as cashiers in McDonald's, we'll get where the USA used to be not too long ago. A bona fide shortage of pilots for any but the top-notch carriers. In conjunction with the artificial shortage created by the 1500-hour rule, it genuinely grounded some regionals for lack of crews. Hence, good packages started being offered, far superior to those in Europe.
You can't be doing P2F from line training till command upgrade. Neither can you survive for years on 18K, however strong your passion is. A job is a job, you count on it to make a living. Anyone in their right mind can only survive for that long sleeping in the car and eating canned beans three times a day. This, if it happens, will lead to flying becoming far less attractive and far less likely to be a lifelong career of choice rather than a few-year "I-tried-flying-a-jet-for-real" affair. And things will self-adjust.
Although I'm in the moderately optimistic lot foreseeing a reasonably good future for the profession, I cannot deny that things will get ugly for anywhere between 1 and 3 years from now. But afterwards, demand will be back and higher than in 2019 and many existing crews will have retired. So, who will be needed to get those planes flying? Hint: not only the 200-hour guys, you can't run any airline on cadets only.