My own kids and their friends often express that science is interesting but they won't get into it because of that.
When my father died and my personal gold mine with him, I had to drop out of mathematics (which I was half-assing anyway), find a way to make money, and here I am now: software developer.
Growing up with nothing into an adulthood with no support network and few prospects, where our society blames you for being in that situation, is a harder draw than being taken care of until you're halfway through college then having to find your own way.
The former quickly breaks down in presence of money, but it is a great enabler for financial risk-taking. ("worst thing that can happen is that I have to go back to ramen", call it scalability of personal finances, if you like).
The latter is quite the opposite, it seeks financial peace of mind and will take stability over opportunity any time. People with this mindset will tend to find the solid, but not stellar pay scale of science rather attractive. Self selection happens.
Are you talking about your math undergrad degree, or graduate degree? Pure math is perhaps a bad example here: in my experience, damn near every high paying field is glad to see a math degree (including seemingly unrelated fields like law, medicine, etc). I've done really well in tech and my math degree (both on paper and in practice) has contributed a lot to that success.
A math graduate degree is a little less of a definite pay-off, but I had a math PhD under me at Google who got hired in with no engineering experience whatsoever at something like 200k/yr. It took him about six months of a bit of handholding but he ended up being one of my most dependably talented people.
I wanted to keep doing math and that's why I was having a hard time finding money.
FWIW, I kept my eye on the ball and five years after finishing undergrad I mostly have work that's heavy in math but is still as lucrative (more actually) than a programming job. It's not a guarantee, but if you like it enough and try to point each step forward towards doing more math, it's definitely possible. I did get other degrees during undergrad though, so that probably shaped the opportunities available to me.
I went into tech as a designer before the wave hit largely because I love computers and the digital medium. They opposed it because of the uncertainty of the industry ("How do you make money as a designer?") but supported me financially while I went through college. Long story short I was able to help make a lucrative company in SV.
I guess to answer your question, I very well could've gone into science because of my parents and well, the prestige.
I pushed my daughter to go to a two-day university bio discovery thing, she absolutely loved it, but said that all the research assistants confirm they can't afford to live and most of them are thinking of dropping into the industry so they can stop asking their parents to help paying the rent.
*he struck through painting and poetry.
This has been the case for centuries: the wealthy simply have always had more means to do more things.
Most of them don't. But not everybody is materialistic or subject to social pressure.
Actually, what annoys me the most as a professor isn't the (comparatively) low salary but the lack of recognition. My family always blames me for not pursuing a more lucrative path and don't understand what I do and what purpose it serves.
My father made the opposite choice and regrets it every day now that his career is coming to a close.
It's important to note that the spectrum you laid out has two other "corners". Many PhDs do mind-numbingly boring work, even if it's original research, while getting paid a pittance.
Conversely, there are many ways to do fascinating, intellectually vigorous and challenging work every day with only a Bachelor's or Master's qualification while getting rich.
There's a second trade-off here too.
PhD/Postdocs do stuff that's mind-numbingly boring at a "micro" level (e.g., actually performing most experiments), but really exciting at a macro level (e.g., figuring out how the brain--or the Sun--works). In industry, there's often the opposite opportunity: exciting day-to-day work for uninteresting goals, like using state-of-the-art machine learning (fun!) to figure out whether a webpage should show a Papa John's or Pizza Hut ad (meh).
If you have a trust fund waiting for you, you can pursue idealistic dreams of changing the world rather than worrying about what will be most likely to leave you with enough money to eat.