I think it's necessary to consider that we as programmers are paid mostly for what counts as 'commissions' or 'elevator music'. Building another REST endpoint or wiring together a CI/CD pipeline hardly counts as advancing the state of the art, but that's what mostly pays the bills.

And on the contrary, let's say you managed to push the state of the art, like you developed a more efficient fast fourier transform, now, how would you go about charging money for that?