I've made a career as a mechanical engineer. My experience has been the opposite of yours, actually, it's been similar.
I've worked at companies that had positions and work cultures like you describe. I've also worked at amazing positions with extraordinary cultures and compensation.
I've been told multiple times, by multiple people that "your smart, you should go into finance". Each time it was right before a big crash, where finance bros were looking for work.
Over the years I've focused on keeping myself busy working on new things, learning new skillsets, and bettering myself. It doesn't really matter that specific discipline you practice, if you are the kind of person that continuously adds to and refines their skills and track record of delivering, that person is then able to charge a premium for that skillset. It doesn't matter if your a jeweler, writer, chef, mechanical engineer.
All this to say, I'm a mechanical engineer, I've designed a ton of cool things, I do it every day. I deeply love it, and get better at it every day because I want to.
I have been fortunate to also have risen above the negatives the commenter above mentioned (low pay, lack of upward mobility, working on not fun stuff like file transitions or whatever). I started in a lower opportunity area, worked my way up through those types of jobs, was able to move myself and my family to a higher opportunity area (SF bay area in my case) and now I lead the design and company building efforts l, do thebfun stuff and contract out the boring stuff like file transitions and sheet metal manufacturing to companies in lower cost of living, lower cost to do business, lower opportunity areas.
All this to say I think that each technical discipline you can choose outside of academia focused things, has pretty equal opportunity, it's far less of a factor than the other factors in your career like location and the types of companies you are working at.