Ultimately the things that make money come down to being in a room where something needs doing and being "hired" to do it - that is, what is good within the marketplace is what the national frameworks of financing and law implicitly deem to be good and worth encouraging.
At the top level, this means big firms that secure funding for big projects and then grab whatever employees they can find to execute on it - and so there are career pathways like the defense contractor business where you're ultimately being employed by the Department of Defense, but in an indirect way where they're your client. Lots of verticals have that kind of relationship. It can also result in small niches where you can become the person who does the one thing well, for a whole industry, and you're always in demand. Like Don LaFontaine for movie trailer voiceovers. But in each case, that kind of thing is often an "end up" - you don't decide early on that you're gonna be the guy who says "in a world" really well, or that you are going to spend years developing some expensive secret weapons system. You just get the offer and say yes, over and over, until it becomes the thing you do.
What influencer social media kind of is, is a way of bootstrapping more niche roles into existence by being really visible on the platform. And I believe that's a big part of the appeal. But it takes a coherent sense of self and one's interests to not end up being used by it as disposable content.
And this intersects with education because there's usually an angle to that sort of thing of building your own community and being a kind of "community manager with a channel" and not necessarily going towards a books and courses upsell so much as a gatekeeper of an online space, one which could be full of possibilities for salon-style discourse.
If what you post is "look at my cool project", it can get some likes, but it doesn't communicate as much or in such a sticky way as "be part of this community".