The other thing which is often implied is that once you're a master of a particular field, that financial success will necessarily follow. This is not the case

The other thing which is often implied is that once you're a master of a particular field, that financial success will necessarily follow. This is not the case. Being a master in your field does improve your odds to a certain point and it can certainly get you a high income. But to actually become wealthy, you need more than skill/talent. Once you get in the top 0.1% of your field, the level of talent/competition is so extremely high that it becomes literally impossible to differentiate skill levels between individuals (even experts in that field can't do it) - Beyond this point, to progress further, you have to rely on either luck or social connections. The hard part is that you have to keep practising/learning like crazy just to maintain your approximate 'ranking'. Thankfully, at that skill level, influential/wealthy people might recognize your talent and may actually bother to answer your emails if you craft them correctly. But yeah, you'd better have damn good emotional intelligence/soft skills because beyond that, it's all about social scheming and manipulation. The #1 most famous person in a given field is rarely the #1 in terms of skill level - They probably rank somewhere in the top 1% or maybe in the top 0.1% (if the field is particularly meritocratic) but it is unlikely that they even make the top 1000 list. The meritocracy factor is probably relatively strong in fields like maths and science (research) but extremely weak in fields like acting, painting or music. It's related to the degree of subjectivity in each field. But I think even in science and engineering, there is a lot more subjectivity involved than most people would admit.