Indeed. UI/UX is actually a pretty shitty career unless you are good enough to regularly pull rabbits out of your hat. At the low end it's just drawing boxes and using someone else's tricks in a system that isn't even the codebase. At the mid end you get the codebase and might occasionally solve interesting problems, but you'll rarely get the recognition and influence equal to its value. Only at the high end do you start getting the rewards, but they tend not to last very long because people quickly adapt to seeing your solutions as obvious.

It's why designers, and creatives more generally, try to cultivate a mystique around themselves, even(/especially?) when they're only mid. The truth is creative work is a lot more playful than it is mysterious, but play is not valued, only mystery is. This leaves many creatives stuck in tension between their internal and external identities.