I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I think the counterpoint is worth stating: that a compiler is the beginning, not the end, of a productive software enginee

I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I think the counterpoint is worth stating: that a compiler is the beginning, not the end, of a productive software engineering toolkit, and that there is no software stack that has achieved perfect tooling—quite on the contrary, I think it might be fair to say that most languages lack a great deal of tooling. There's every reason to think that software engineers and system administrators do their job much more quickly and correctly when they have the support of rich editor support, understandable compiler errors, usable interactive debuggers, profilers, dependency management that won't set your hair on fire, etc. For whatever reason, it seems like businesses often aren't interested or successful in creating these products, so frustrated developers step in to create the tools they dream of in their own work after too many days spent refactoring with regex. It's possible that people might be drawn to tooling projects because of some kind of internalized revulsion in response to the social impact of their employer, but I think you'd expect to see developers working on tooling regardless of whether or not this is the case because of how a lot of development tooling just wouldn't exist if it weren't for individual FOSS contributors' efforts.