Very few people make a living out of chess compared to number of mathematicians. There are only ~2k chess grandmasters in the world and you barely make enough money to sustain yourself unless you are a top one, whereas we have probably hundreds of thousands of mathematicians in the world.
I don't think it's a problem at all that math cannot be appreciated as easily as chess. Math is supported through government funds and donations because we believe it's far more useful and interesting than chess. Its benefits far exceed that of just producing some new theorems and results and I believe we will continue to keep funding maths at the same pace, for the sake of humanity.
What's in danger is the hierarchy within the math communities, which largely relied on the ability to produce more interesting mathematics, an ability that is being commoditized by LLMs.
Without commenting on the correctness of this claim, I want to briefly say a few words about what it would mean in practice.
Chess is supportable as a hobby in part because one can pick up the rules of chess in an afternoon. While one can't quickly play at a high level, it is relatively easy to appreciate the game, and have fun at it.
Research math is not like this. Over the last decades we have made incredible progress understanding basic concepts (number, shape, etc.) but the edifice we have built to do so requires an incredible time investment. Learning the ideas that go into proving, or understanding the proof of, basic statements like Fermat's last theorem requires years of institutional support.
It's possible that soon, AI will be able to do work at this level; despite recent successes, this isn't the case yet. But even if it can do this, why would it? Without people who care about these deep but fundamental ideas, who will ask it to? Perhaps it might on its own, or a person asking it to "do some cool math" might elicit a similarly deep idea, but who would understand it, if doing so requires years of unsupported work?
In practice, turning pure math into a hobby means the end of pure math, and the end of people who understand basic mathematical concepts at a deep level. Whether this is something we want is something we'll have to decide together.