This suggestion was raised on Commons but applies equally on enwiki and probably many other wikis.
Confirmed status is granted by admins to bypass the waiting period/edit count requirement for users they trust. Most if not all of those accounts become eligible for autoconfirmed after some time, at which point there is no use for "confirmed" anymore.
I imagine that MediaWiki could continue checking if a user is eligible for autoconfirmed even when already "confirmed" (I would guess that right now it doesn't?) and when the user becomes eligible, not only grant autoconfirmed (which it already does) but also remove confirmed.