To me, the biggest mystery is why IT keeps tasking programmers with mundane and repetitive tasks when, unlike in other professions, the beauty of programming lies in the fact that you can abstract and automate the repetition.
Why we need million programmers building CRUD apps, why they don't have a standard already?
Same reason we have dozens of languages with very minor differences (not different paradigms), endless discussions on formatting despite opinionated linters/formatters existing, bike shedding meetings, and more.
People keep talking about how the programmers often choose technologies to advance their own CVs, as opposed to doing what is the best for the company. Guess what, managers do analogical things all the time. It is the most reliable way to climb up the corporate ladder.
The "blue collar" description does not fit well though, as most other high-skill, white-collar jobs (lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers) are similarly repetetive and mundane. Typically, the company hires experts to do the same thing over and over again. You can escape that by going into research position (but even they can get quite mundane and boring, in current publish-or-perish culture) or by changing career fields every couple of years (not really realistic for most people).