This is especially true because for doing most _hard_ EE work, you really need access to a fab, and so a lot of money. This is not really the case for most hard CS work.
Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits.
EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.
You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.
Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills.
Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.
Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :)
A comment on the application side:
> "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering"
Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs.
Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system.
Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.
In EE the factories that produce PCBs are also called fabs.
I think the explosion in availability of inexpensive microcontrollers and FPGA dev boards have made it much easier for people to get into hardware design without spending a ton of money. This has also made it cheaper to buy high end test equipment, you don't need to buy a $3k Keysight oscope when a cheap Chinese USB oscope works just as well with plenty of features built-in for free. Obviously a proper academic or corporate research lab is going to be a lot different than a well-equiped hobbyist lab but the difference is not as stark as you'd imagine.
I say all this as a recovering semiconductor engineer: EE is a huge field. I can’t think of a subdiscipline where we’ve run out of new ideas to explore, and most of them don’t require bucketfuls of HF. The real problem is that the financial rewards are relatively small, the math is ferocious, and there are so few practitioners, let alone experts doing research.