Yes it can - just not in stills cameras alone. And the low end is hardly dead - just low-end stills cameras at a premium price.
The money's in the sensor business, not the dedicated stills camera business. At the high end, robots need eyes. Everything from intelligent security systems, to medical equipment, to driverless cars and drones. Many things need multiple sensors. More demanding applications need higher resolution, greater sensitivity and higher frame rates - features in common with high-end sensors. Intelligent recognition systems have a great deal in common with camera features such as eye focus and facial recognition. Making dedicated cameras is a part of that larger business.
At the lower end, almost every device these days has some sort of camera in it. Sony's selling more phone and computer camera sensors than Canon or Nikon ever did with dedicated low-end cameras.
Canon and Sony have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, from the decline of the dedicated industry and the integration of photography equipment into the wider electronics market. It's only Nikon that has everything to lose, being a company that does little other than make cameras (and some non-digitally-integrated optical equipment) using other people's sensors. Leica can probably hang on as a niche maker of a luxury, almost fashion-like product (a bit like Gucci or Rolex), but theirs is a much smaller and less competitive turf to defend.
Nikon's best bet is probably to return to its roots as an optics company and concentrate on providing lenses for all sorts of camera and other optical systems, as a competitor to Carl-Zeiss. Like the sensor business, that's a large, and expanding, area, and one in which Nikon has expertise and manufacturing capability. An expanded and dedicated lens and optics company, supplying products to many manufacturers and compatible with many product lines, has a much better chance of surviving independently than a Nikon which does a bit of everything and only makes lenses for its own equipment.
