My feeling is that even in our own thinking symbols are used mostly to communicate our (inherently non-symbolic) thoughts to others or record them; i.e. they are a solution to a bandwidth-limited transfer of information while the actual thinking process happens with concepts that have more similarity to collections of vague parameters and associations which can be compressed to symbols only imperfectly with losses.

From that perspective, I don't see how symbolic AI would be competitive but there would be a role for symbolic AI in designing systems that can be comprehensible for humans, but perhaps just as a distillation/compression output from a non-symbolic system. I.e. have a strong "black box" ML system that learns to solve a task, and then have it construct a symbolic system that solves that task worse, but in an explainable way.