Actually extremely common in reality. If you're a landscaper, you don't typically go from there to being the CEO of Facebook, but after a few years you may end up in a supervisory position managing other workers. Or you save up enough money for a down payment on some equipment to start your own landscaping company.

There are indeed people who stay in dead end jobs indefinitely, but such people are not the majority of people.

The most common jobs in the US are largely, indeed, roles that would call “dead-end jobs”:

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_char...

What makes you think most of those have no career path? The number one, Retail Salespersons, have the obvious path into becoming sales managers for the local office, then the region etc. Even fast food workers can become the store manager.

And those jobs often have less competition for those management positions because they're so often held by college students who go on to jobs in the industry they've studied rather than competing with other salespersons or fast food workers for the office manager position.