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OK, these are new thoughts for me & might not be brilliantly expressed but I’d be interested in comment...
NB I am an ex-salesman. Not any of the following; lawyer, doctor, teacher, sportsperson, police officer or creative artist (you’ll see the relevance of this later...)

We all know that people who are employed in repetitive tasks requiring little thought, originality or creativity, don’t get paid much & few would argue this is wrong. Soon to be replaced by machines that won’t get paid at all.

In contrast other careers, law, science, medicine require those attributes in abundance & if you can’t do them, you’re pretty much excluded immediately for incompetence, while those that remain & succeed get well rewarded.

Here’s my thoughts as to where this system, though it has served us well, might have yielded the wrong result in some fields, because of us & our societies.

Some fields of enterprise naturally make us want the best, the brilliant, the outstanding. Who wants to watch an average footballer, or have an average attorney/doctor or listen to an average musician/performer? These fields are ultra competitive & the system seems to work.
We produce well paid individuals good at challenging tasks that meet our requirements.

Other fields seem to motivate us differently & the one that leaps to mind is education (just an example that I think I can use to illustrate the point). Do people want a brilliant instructor who is able to produce the most able pupils, over and above the next class of pupils, in the same ultra competitive manner?
I’d say if teaching was as selective, highly rewarded & competitive as say medicine, we could have produced some unbelievably good instructors, worlds apart from their rivals, that could produce pupils able to outperform other teachers pupils with ease, just as attorneys & sportspeople outperform each based on their ability.

But we haven’t & probably don’t want to. Teaching is collaborative, with discussions regarding best practice, where theoretically everyone can benefit.
I’d suggest it hasn’t worked very well however...

We have national curriculums to ensure everybody gets taught the same material, removing opportunity for excellence in choosing what is taught & what deserves to be ignored as irrelevant. Teaching gets standardised. No opportunity for a teacher to say, “no I didn’t bother with that ancient rubbish to focus on matters more important like...”
Examinations are equally standardised testing on the standard curriculum, to ensure the kiddies all got the same material & have understood sufficiently to regurgitate the prescribed correct answer.
It’s an industry traditionally dominated by unions that negotiate pay for all teachers, not the good ones vs the bad ones, all of them. A brilliant teacher cannot make much of a case to receive double or triple the pay of their rival teacher, based on the fact they achieve 3+ times better results when they work within such a regulated industry.
In fact how teachers get measured is not the winners vs losers manner of say sportspeople, attorneys in court, doctors with patients that survive & thrive (or the less pleasant alternative...) or songwriters/portrait painters/actors.
The only comparable way to measure instruction would be to look at relative subsequent success of pupils & thereafter reward the teachers that produced able pupils more, compared to the ones that generated incompetents.

So teaching becomes one of those careers where instructors are involved in repetitive rigorously controlled instruction & suddenly doesn’t reward, brilliance, originality, creativity, not because it shouldn’t, but because it doesn’t. Based on what society wishes to achieve, rather than the actual merits of the field.

Teaching could involve equal attributes & skills that medicine does. Making a young person able to think & understand challenging concepts is not in any obvious way, easier than keeping them physically well. But we seem to want genius doctors & automaton teachers.

So to conclude these thoughts. I believe some professions are treated differently to others based not on their merits, but on society’s desired outcome.
Medicine is thought to require all the attributes that achieve remarkable & never ending progress as demonstrated by an industry that seems to revolutionise itself every generation.
Teaching is not thought to require these attributes & so doesn’t reward them, resulting in an industry many feel is sometimes making insignificant progress if any at all.
Just to show no “anti-teacher” sentiment is intended here, another area which in my view is probably similar is criminal justice (totally regimented from end to end (police, courts, all the way to jails).
Here we have an industry, often achieving nothing in terms of crime reduction/prevention which should be it’s primary objective & how it’s measured. Yet, despite incredible resources & manpower thrown at it, we often have endless violent street crime, fuelled by drug revenue & overflowing jails.

I don’t think one field of expertise is more important than the other, but the outcomes we have achieved reflect the manner in which they are viewed by society. Some are enhanced, while others devalued. It probably won’t change, but it should.

I’m gonna hit the submit button now (to receive anticipated abuse) but the way some fields of enterprise make never ending progress, while others stagnate is real interesting to me & these were some recent thoughts I had which might explain what’s happening. Please excuse spelling/grammar errors...

Modern pre-college education in the US was designed to educate a workforce for industrial assembly work. There was a separate system for vocational training for service jobs that required specific skills like plumbing, auto repair, and others that are essential. but don't need college educations. College education is a holdover from a much older educations system which was for certain professions and is divided into more skills than high school and advanced skills like medicine, law, etc.

Union rules about some professions are a way to control who can work in a field. For instance in most states you can't teach below college level without an education degree, but you can teach college students without one. It's a way to set standards without testing each member. Other fields require testing and/or certification before you can work in them with law and medicine being the most notable examples.

Some jobs don't really need an education because the worker can be taught to do a repetitive task or trained to do just a few functions. Being the best doesn't mean anything because there isn't room for improvement. Being the best ditch digger isn't much more than an average ditch digger. While being the worst ditch digger means the ditch collapses causing trouble.

I had a friend looking for work during a recessions with different resumes he used depending upon the job. They ranged from he had college degrees as a BS in one engineering field and a MS in another, just his first BS degree, and he finished high school barely. For a job where he shoveled gravel onto a conveyor belt, he used the last one and his boss told him he didn't want anyone that went to college because they couldn't do the job. So the first shovel full didn't go to the right spot and the boss ran over to check if he had gone to college because the last time someone made that error, he was a college student.

An interesting review of some the issues relevant to US Education.
It emphasises a point that such arcane BS would unlikely to be allowed to influence, a law practice, or a top of the line cancer clinic, or an NFL team, or a University research department, or a technology company, or I’m sure you’re bored by now...
But we permit this kind of stuff to remain relevant in mainstream education of the richest nation on Earth. Why? Do we expect so little, from something so important?