Law is a well paying profession in general, insofar as many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. You’re correct that only a relatively few people make the kind of money people think lawyers make, and the profession is highly segregated by education. Most people at my law school (northwestern) went on to a big firm job with a salary of $200k rising to $500k after 8 years. A few places lower on the ranking scales, at good public schools, it was more like 1 in 4.

I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.

For the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, however, it can be very rewarding. I’m a decade out of law school, and still enjoying the grind. So is my wife, snd most of the people I graduated with. I’ve got a STEM degree and was a programmer in a previous life, and enjoy the analytical aspect of law. It also combines an element of verbal advocacy and adversarial competition I found lacking in engineering.

I would certainly recommend my kids to go into the profession, at least my oldest who has the temperament for it. What personalities the younger two will have remains to be seen, but I would certainly counsel against them becoming lawyers out of inertia or because they got a useless undergraduate degree. (As an Asian parent, I have no compunction about insisting on STEM degrees for all of them!)