[FirmwareBurner]

>or raked it in by founding software/crypto firms.

That's not exactly something to be proud of in life or someone to look up to. Charles Ponzi, Andrew Tate, and the dozens of other influencers also became quite wealthy by finding legal ways to part desperate people of their money.

>Zero of 'em went anywhere near "uber-difficult engineering technology" stuff, like semiconductor manufacturing.

And yet thank God we have no shortage of people who take the difficult path to working on the cutting edge technology to move humanity and the world forward instead of choosing the easy way of moving buffers around to push ads to people for big money, because we can't have a world where everybody is a webdev(satirized well by South Park).