Most folks can make a simple pastry, which is what is more common in homes and such. A lot of folks can make a simple cake. Not everyone can make the puff pastry themselves, get delicate things to come out correctly, and so on. Not everyone can successfully make a 4-tier wedding cake, be able to tell the cake itself has enough structural support, nor can they effectively decorate it - on top of producing the myriad of other desserts needed. Folks take some months getting good at the decorating itself, actually.
Add in there bread and any sort of savory item that might be in a pastry shell as well. Knowing the spices and stuff like that.
"It will not be glorious but it might be edible" : Is this truly enough for you if you are paying for it? Getting married? Would you pay a premium for something simply edible? Yeah... Neither would I.
Additionally, pastry chefs (and other chefs) often have some education in business practices and margin producing sorts of things. Would you have thought of ordering grade b potatoes to mash? How about onions? Could you take some leftover food and make it into some wonderful-tasting special the next day?
The bigger reason chefs have bad salaries is because it is kitchen work. It is a service job. And service pays badly.
From your first line to your last, I can't disagree more or more strongly.
"Edible" is not a sufficient performance by a decent amateur baker, let alone a pastry chef who likely also knows things quite intimately beyond cupcakes like working with sugar and various frostings, fondants, meringues, flans, pies, tarts, cakes, puddings and custards and so on...
When you add that to razor thin profit margins intolerant to waste such that a "recompile" is completely unacceptable then you start to talk about the real aspects of skillful pastry chefs.
Sorry but there are no 10-generation artisans labouring endlessly to bring you your $5 cupcake. Its just 15-year old kids working to get some money towards college.
The world is larger and has far more tradition and expertise in food that your local USA neighborhood, "dude".
You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.
The arrogance is bleeding out of the text itself, I'm not even sure how that's possible but it's happening.
What happens when you need to debug, and you don't understand anything because you copy-pasted from a tutorial? How long would an employer be willing to wait while you google for the right tutorial telling you how to fix the problem?
What I am saying is that, according to industry data, any random person can be trained to the degree of 'pastry chef' of 'barista' with something like several weeks of training.
And that is basically indistinguishable from 'no-skill worker'.
Mmmmmmmaybe if you're writing boring CRUD (and any non-YouTube educated engineering would probably think of automating this). Fortunately there are much more interesting problems that can take an entire team of world-class engineers to solve, working gloriously or just barely.
Some code really is hard to write.
For one, pastries are not relegated to the simple stuff a 6-month training guy that put on an apron can make.
There are pastry shops that produce stuff as hard, if not harder, than what the best restaurant chefs produce.
In fact, pastries can be challenging even for top chefs otherwise very knowledgable in regular cooking.
Um, what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastry
I don't see a great controversy brewing here. Pastry. What do you think it means?
And at the top tiers (like people who do $2000 wedding cakes), pastry chefs are definitely highly skilled and highly trained.
You can spend 30 minutes learning on youtube, and you will be able to make some basic pastry. It will not be glorious but it might be edible.
Otherplace in this thread somebody was quoting some pastry chef claiming that "it takes months" to learn to do cupcakes or whatever.
That "months" is a definition of low-skill job.
Which is why pastry chefs have minimum-wage salaries basically. Btw, the "chef" moniker here is kind of silly.