I agree with you, but I feel like leaving is much harder in reality for most people.
Life gets in the way, you don't have the energy to apply, you're afraid of rejection, you are afraid you might end up in a worse environment, you justify it to yourself in any number of ways.
Inertia, herd mentality and self-deception are much more powerful IRL than most people online seem to think (or at least write).
Add having a family to the mix and it gets worse. Being a sole provider for a family is scary when you go job hunting, especially if you live in an environment that is very expensive (where the jobs that pay decent are located normally).
Yep, I left one project because I think I was underpaid there. I could not find another job for like 3 months. I finally found one and I was also very stressful. No it is better, at the same project and I think I make more money than I would ever be able in a project I left. But on the other hand it was very stressful for my family. Was it worth it in the end? I do not know because even if money is better and company is bigger I could damage my kids development by being angry, sad and depressed for two years.
I saw the same thing and always wondered how you can manage it effectively.
I had a team of data engineers that wanted to do more data science, and 2 data scientists that both wanted to be data engineers(one of them argued that everyone wants to be DS and so it was too crowded, saying that they could make more money as a DE).
I also remember a specific instance where, one day, my friend ranted about how he needs to step away from pure front end and that it's a dead end career (he was quite good at it too!) and then the next day at lunch a colleague started complaining about how front end developers get all the credit and he's considering moving.
Sometimes it's a "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" thing or a FOMO thing. But sometimes different roles fit different people better.
I started my career doing mostly full stack work. I couldn't get away from the front end part quickly enough. I had intuition for simplifying UI flows, but none at all for aesthetics. As requests for aesthetic changes came in from our excellent designers, they felt completely arbitrary to me, even though they probably weren't. Most of my career was as a data engineer, data engineering manager, or leading an ML-heavy org. That space fit me so much better.
I loved having a few self-starting front-end devs in my orgs - they could take various tools we were creating for ourselves and make them quite a bit more useful. But it was also always a stepping stone as they typically wanted to work on the public facing part of the product.
What's your point? The fact that we still have sickness means things are worse?
What I find fascinating is how people like you, who reference a "pure" and "analog" world, have very "binary" views. Nature is complex, everything is continuous and lives on a spectrum, nothing is binary (not even death). Things can be way better, slightly better, worse etc. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad", everything exists somewhere in between.
But your thinking is so simple and naive, it's a travesty of the nature you appeal to.
I wish more people viewed things this way.
Feels like a lot of the public discourse now is "strong claims, vibes as evidence".