I personally have experienced the more-money-less-difficulty science-to-coding gradient. You can say that programming can be arbitrarily difficult, which is true, the reality is that it usually isn't arbitrarily difficult, and corporations are happy to pay non-geniuses lots and lots of money to reliably design systems that work with zero marginal cost, whereas if you want to make $160k as a ground-level researcher, making 1% improvements to products with very substantial marginal costs, using million-dollar equipment to do your job, you'd have to be a rare intellect indeed, and beyond that be great at selling your own value.

In software, there's no such thing as marginal cost, the only tool you need is a $300 laptop, and all you need to know can be read for free online. That's an amazing world, from an economic standpoint, and it's no surprise at all that it's so much easier to make money that way.