Did it? I’ve not seen people paying for photographs on the ceiling and have not seen feet long framing of portraits inside someone home. It just became possible to capture snapshots of moments as they happened
You're thinking of the household-name famous artists (so-called "fine artists"), but those were far from the only ones.
There used to be many thousands of itinerant portrait painters ("commercial artists"), maybe tens of thousands. These guys would travel from town to town banging out quick pictures of members of your family or local dignitaries or the new City Hall or whatever. They weren't bad artists (they had to be competent to earn a living), but neither were they Leonardos.
Think of the best artist in an average high school class. Back then, going into the portrait painting business would have been a valid career option for that guy (they were almost all guys).
Now, some of them later became famous artists, or became famous for other reasons (Samuel Morse, of Morse Code fame, earned his living as a portrait painter at one point), but they were basically just tradesmen.
All those guys lost their jobs almost immediately when photography appeared.
Even today, unless you're very unusual, I'd bet you have way more professional photographs than professional paintings in your home (weddings, graduations, baptisms/bar mitzvahs/analogues for other religions...)
Photography replaced painting for creating a realistic likeness, but painting as art had moved beyond that already. Photography became a new art form itself, alongside (instead of replacing) painting.
Yeah, I do not buy the idea that Photography replaced painting. Especially since capturing abstract forms, and less realistic interpretations is still something hard to accomplish in photos.
It did absolutely replace the need to commission someone to draw you, I guess. But that is a small subsection of what painting is and was.
There's a simple test: Do we have less of more illustrators now than we had in 1816 (quick Wikipedia lookup for when the camera was invented)? We should probably adjust this for total population, i.e. compare the percentage of illustrators. I don't have the numbers, but my gut feeling would be it's a lot higher now than it was back then.
The fallacy is thinking that humans only do work somebody needs, and that our needs are static. Turns out they evolve, sometimes in quite unexpected and even hilarious ways. Humanity seems to have a predisposition for keeping everyone busy.
