I'd wager that's the reason. People can't relate to it. Not even close.

I'm not scraping by in my early twenties with a futon trying to bust into a career with a full year's salary in student loan debt. I immediately started making what many people make at the tail end of what they'd call a good career. All while coming in just about whenever I feel like it.

My life is a joke in comparison and it's just a coincidence that I landed in it. Same with other guys I know. They happened to like something, such as making Quake mods and then stumbled into making 200k/year in 35hr per week, with maybe half of that 35 being YAML engineering.

Yes, this is exactly it. It’s hard not to feel weird when every day I’m surrounded by hardworking individuals who aren’t making nearly as much as I do. It just doesn’t feel right. Is the difference in produced value actually that great? I mean I sure as heck wouldn’t be able to do what I do without without the collective support of all of these people.

I know what YAML is, but what do you mean by YAML engineering? Fields of engineering with a focus on creating/editing YAML config files?

I think it was facetious. For example, lots of ops work is producing mountains upon mountains of YAML to feed into tools like Terraform just to provision and glue things together.