BTW, I totally disagree with the notion that high pay is the reward for hard work or even education

You are absolutely correct, and anyone who thinks hard work = money is not thinking clearly. In a nutshell:

money = market value of whatever you have to sell.

If your Ph.D. is physics is not something people value, don’t expect to get paid much. The world does not owe you a living based on any measure of ‘dues paid in’, it pays only for ‘value your produce’.

Note that we may disagree over how the market values various things. For example, I don’t believe mortgage brokers produced much value, but the market did, for a while. Now it doesn’t.