> the gulf between ham radio and modern RF comms is truly vast

Especially if you consider modern cellular radios. Your phone has a completely separate powerful computer just for handling the radio (we still call this a modem for some reason), with a large software stack running.

As for modulation, starting with LTE and turbo coding, we are now near the maximum theoretical channel capacity (Shannon limit), which is mind-blowing.

Learning the basics of radio is still worth the effort (and great fun!), but the gap is indeed huge.