People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.
I was a research associate about 15 years ago. The top tier CS researcher at that leading university payscale was something like $70k, that was the cap out.
It's pretty good in the US. I just looked up a randomly chosen assistant professor at a public university and they make $200k. I only looked up one person's salary so this isn't cherry picked.
I'm not saying that they're in it for the money. I'm only disagreeing with the part where you said that the pay is garbage.
It's not an infinite amount of money and it's less than industry, but it seems not garbage considering job prestige, job benefits, etc.
https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
A lot of professors are making over 200k, but most that I knew were around 150k.
(You can also find all the 5M positions, usually head coach)