The trouble is that everyone is clubbed together in "IT". Roboticists, distributed-systems experts, ML folks everyone is linguistically the same as someone who does IT support.

This being the case, it's not surprising that people don't understand the value of things: while they use Apple/Android etc. their immediate association with "IT" is that lowly dork who fixes their computer.

You see this in India too. From a industry full of low-level "IT-coolies" a few decades back, the aspirational places to work now are the "product" companies, where you don't just do grunt work.