And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
There will never be equality in outcomes.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
My problem is that "it's unfair" turns it into a value judgment. Then when someone is skeptical that it can be improved without making things worse overall, or worse when someone is skeptical of a particular proposed solution, that gets turned into a moral failing.
If you perceive disagreement over the fairness of paying people badly for risky jobs, I think it's because it's so basic that people just skip over that. A small child can identify unfairness. The interesting and difficult part is what to do about it.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period