> (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc)

I remember countless stories like this circulating when I was in high school. Someone who wasn’t going to college was instead going off to do some obscure thing like work on oil rigs or do welding in hazardous locations.

The hook was always that they heard a friend of a friend brag about some extreme hourly rate they made one time a few years ago and assumed that’s just what the job always paid.

Then they went out and did it, learned that the job was terrible, and discovered that the average pay was a lot less than the all-time highest number that people would quote.