It's not enough to like the work for it to be easy: it's also important that your work be appreciated and encouraged. Scholze happens to be interested in a popular/prestigious subfield of mathematics, but my experience suggests there's a substantial number of talented mathematicians who leave academia and mathematics itself for some kind of industry job because their interests are in more obscure/less glamorous subfields of mathematics, meaning that they receive little to no support (or even respect) from their colleagues.

For example, consider William Stein's recent exit from academia that was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11883987 motivated by essentially the same lack of support; now imagine how many don't even make it to tenure before they have to struggle with their interests and values being misaligned from those of the academic mathematical community.