I'm honestly not sure how it's different from consultants who are only home on weekends after a week at a customer site in $RANDOM_CITY, engineers who have to basically live on a job site for weeks at a time, any number of professions that involve a lot of travel including weekend travel, or even the other salaried professions with on-call such as doctors.

If those all sound awful, by all means, do something else. But they're tradeoffs that people accept for their chosen job and compensation. My first job I would regularly be in shipyards and offshore for weeks at a time supervising some job. There was a modest allowance after some length of time but it paid better--and was almost certainly more interesting--than some routine office engineering job.