You have a point tbh. There are simply way more jobs for people to do simple web programming and making UIs that are essentially just DB interfaces for people who can't write SQL statements. It's boring, but it can still be hugely profitable for small/medium sized business who do everything with Excel or by hand currently. These businesses often have a huge need for relatively simple automation tasks. And they simply don't need someone who can write that in C++21 with intrinsics for absolute maximum performance - because even a badly written php script on a normal desktop PC chews through the few thousand database entries they have in 150 ms. But of course a human would need days for that, if not weeks.

Do you get payed significantly more if you're in some sort of super high performance or embedded field and you constantly need to re-invent the wheel to squeeze out every bit of latency you can, plus you can spend an hour on every line of code to make sure it absolutely never fails, ever? Or if you're working as what is almost more of a mathematician on ground breaking ML algorithms? Sure. But there are also way less jobs like that. Also if everyone had the education for those jobs, it'd probably not be a healthy industry anymore.

I think we also need to get away from the idea that the only reason there are people excelling at squeezing every bit of latency out of an embedded system is because they went to a 4-year school. There are so many people who go get an associates because their career isn't going anywhere. So they go get a bachelor's because their career isn't going anywhere. Then they go get an MBA because their career isn't going anywhere. And then they're posting on LinkedIn looking for better offers, covered in debt, and think we should make degrees appear to be a costless decision. A degree doesn't change your personality, and sometimes that's the problem. We think too highly of degrees in too broad a context and think degrees === qualifications.

But most employers don't care about having a "proper engineer". They want someone who knows $LATEST_HOT_FRAMEWORK which a trades education can provide.

I've been in the trade professionally for 30 years. In only one interview have I been asked about how I would design something or (Linux) computer fundamentals. Every other interview was about how well I knew a specific technology.

Well that's my point: I'm usually asked design questions, so it's a good thing (or it's the cause) that I have an engineering-focused degree.

But for other jobs, if people can learn how to make business applications like it's a trade, and it eliminates unreasonable costs and even eliminates a bunch of biases, how is that bad? There's no reason for me to try and compete head-to-head for those jobs. It's a different niche.