We aren't talking about nurses or school teachers. We are talking about professors at large research universities.
Your sibling comment speaks of working "nights and weekends" with frequent travel. That puts an enormous amount of work and stress on their partner, and faculty usually don't make enough money to offset those contributions.
Deciding not to optimize for wealth is perfectly fine. Doing to do so while working nights and weekends with frequent travel isn't. Optimizing for "prestige" is infinitely worse than optimizing for "wealth", because at least the latter can be shared and has utility beyond pure ego.
Deciding to sacrifice your nights, weekends, and financial life to work on science and research is okay. But it's also enormously selfish. Other people who spend time doing "what they love" -- ski bums, for example -- at least recognize their selfishness as such.
Being selfish can be okay. But it's probably not great to be selfish and try to build a life-long partnership. Especially if you don't realize you are being selfish.
I won't tell anyone not to ski bum or not to do a PhD. But I will gut check people when they get confused about the difference between selfish and selfless dedication to a craft. An academic career -- the type where you spend nights and weekends without at least contributing a modicum of financial comfort to those around you -- is selfish.
At the end of the day, most grant-funded projects are born useless. There isn't as much of a difference between ski bumming and PhDing as professors like to pretend.
If you think the majority of people in your current field are not optimizing for prestige (and you're past the mid-point of a PhD), I would love to know what field that is - seriously.
Who cares if they make more or less than a techbro? If they're happy with their job and they earn enough to pay for things they want (house, vacations, whatever), then they should chase the rat-race of the "ladder of success" because...?