What is the most common type of autism?

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That was true in 1970, when autism criteria were very restrictive and autism was thought to be one in ten thousand. Nowadays--not so much. A lot of those new diagnoses are milder cases in kids who are mainstreamed in school and will be independent adults. Some others are in kids who have developmental delay and would have been diagnosed with intellectual disability only, but now have an autism/ID dual diagnosis--we are effectively "stealing" cases from the intellectual disability category. The upshot of it is that the average autistic in modern times is a good deal more independent than they used to be, even though there are more cases of "low-functioning autism" now than there used to be, too. The milder cases simply increased in number much faster than the ones that are comorbid with ID.

Seems to me that your experts are just falling prey to the availability bias. The people they see are the people who need the most help, because those are the people who see experts much more often. The majority, who need less help, are getting it from social workers and teachers and aides with a two-week training program, rather than going to experts.

PDD-NOS is the most common kind, as AS and Classic Autism have rather narrow diagnosis whereas PDD-NOS = Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, making it a far wider diagnosis. The Wiki page on Autism Spectrum Disorders has these statistics: All ASD:
6/1,000, Classic Autism: 1/1,000, Asperger's: 0.6/1,000, childhood disintegrative disorder: 0.02/1,000, and PDD-NOS: 3.7 per 1,000.

I always thought of it as a J curve, where there are very few people with severe autism, but as the severity decreases, the numbers increase exponentially.

That is exactly what I thought.

That was true in 1970, when autism criteria were very restrictive and autism was thought to be one in ten thousand. Nowadays--not so much. A lot of those new diagnoses are milder cases in kids who are mainstreamed in school and will be independent adults. Some others are in kids who have developmental delay and would have been diagnosed with intellectual disability only, but now have an autism/ID dual diagnosis--we are effectively "stealing" cases from the intellectual disability category. The upshot of it is that the average autistic in modern times is a good deal more independent than they used to be, even though there are more cases of "low-functioning autism" now than there used to be, too. The milder cases simply increased in number much faster than the ones that are comorbid with ID.

Seems to me that your experts are just falling prey to the availability bias. The people they see are the people who need the most help, because those are the people who see experts much more often. The majority, who need less help, are getting it from social workers and teachers and aides with a two-week training program, rather than going to experts.

Autistics traits appear to be on a bell curve in the population, just like IQ is.