Truckers can still make an upper middle class salary, especially if they own their truck or focus on a niche (refrigerated, military deliveries, cross border, etc.)
Truckers are not doing so well these days, and where they do make a lot it's typically because of backbreaking labor and/or taking on financial risks. This still only gets you into lower/mid tier software dev wages.
A lot of the "well paying", low-status jobs mentioned in this thread are dangrous... long-haul truckers, construction workers, underwater welders, even electricians are jobs where you have to risk your life to do them, and many of them are statistically dangerous as well.
So whether the people who have such jobs are "well compensated" for risking their lives like that is debatable.
Certainly an IT manager job that paid the same as a trucker would be far more preferable in terms of safety, and would therefore be far better compensated when the danger of being a trucker is taken in to account.
Of course, low-paid delivery jobs are even worse when you consider that those low-paid delivery drivers have to risk their lives on the road to deliver your packages.
This strikes me as just making up reasons why examples that disprove the status/pay point aren’t really disproving it.
If you can just make up reasons why your position is right anyway even in cases where it’s not, then it’s basically unfalsifiable.
I thought there was a trucker shortage happening?
In truckers' cases it must be a shortage of experienced truckers willing to partake in backbreaking labor and take financial and health risks for $60k / year.