The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.
So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you are willing to attribute meaning to people providing value to one another, which I definitely do. I don't think that video gaming (at least on one's own) is as meaningful for society.
Under the view of the grandparent, the metric/proxy of salary has become so utterly meaningless because of modern day business behavior that it is no longer a meaningful thing to pursue (or never was).
I personally also have some problems with your view. According to you a corporated lawyer earning $500/hour by drafting contracts is 50x as valuable to society as someone earning $10/hour caring for disabled people, which I think is very untrue. What "the market" values and what we as people should value only has a partial correlation.
Another example, a lot of people value their family and children above all else, while having children leads to almost zero reward from "the market".
Salaries are in essence what we are willing to pay one another for each other's time and effort. In your example, people are willing to pay a person 50 times as much for drafting a contract than for taking care of a disabled person. I don't see anything inherently wrong with this. There could be various reasons explaining this disparity, ranging from a lack of availability of people who can do that, to that job potentially being more difficult in some ways, and probably also down to it being more important in some ways, e.g. directly affecting the lives of thousands of people. Whatever the reasons are, the people who choose to pay the fee were probably unable to negotiate a lower fee for a similar level of work.
On the other hand, the question of "what we should value" is much more amorphous and I'd be interested to hear of ideas on how to model and practically implement that, if you have any. There only alternative frameworks I'm familiar with are communism, with its well known share of problems and "time banks" which I've seen working decently well at a local level, but don't tend to scale.
A couple years out of college, I actually did start a casual game company. Ended up giving up on it because by then I didn't really keep up with or care much about the gaming industry, but not before launching a website that hosted ~100 or so games, and getting some initial users. Most of our traffic came from the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. during the hours of 9 AM - 6 PM EST weekdays.
I recently took a glance around the gaming world. It's amazing how much it's changed. There are more AAA titles than you could possible know about. There are massively-multiplayer F2P games that people spend hundreds of dollars on. People will actually pay to watch other people play games, and there are folks who make full-time livings streaming games on Twitch.
It's different than it was in the 80s. Almost all the kids I grew up with had Nintendos or PCs, but it was a kids thing. Those kids are adults now, and they have disposable income (though not necessarily a lot of it), and the idea of climbing the corporate ladder is becoming less and less attractive to many people because corporations have made a habit of pulling the ladder out from under you just as you're halfway up. So people put the minimum amount of effort needed to not get fired into their jobs, and they spend their competitive energies in one of thousands of different games on their nights, weekends, and occasionally (if server logs are to be believed) workdays.
It's probably bad for the competitiveness of the American economy, but it's been great for the gaming industry.