What I’m still not clear on is what is the perceptual effect of losing those supporting cells. It’s not like they do nothing. Tough thing to ask a mouse. “Mr. Whiskers, how does how you hear now compare to how you heard before?”
That being said, cochlear implants offer a completely new sort of signal to the brain and the brain eventually reinterprets it to sound normal, so perhaps we can assume that that would happen in this case, too.