Massage not so much.
You play 'against the course' under the exact same conditions as every other competitor to see who can get the lowest score over the course of a week. Shoot low scores week after week, win tournaments, receive a ranking. Pretty straightforward.
Golf is unique among mass-market sports in that your performance is not subject to the effects of your opponents' play (other than psychologically). Nobody's blocking you or hitting shots at you that you must return. It's just your decisions, your ability, and the course in front of you.
Most skills aren’t so easily evaluated, measured, ranked. Part of the problem is what we measure. For a programmer do we look at lines of code per day? Commits? Bugs found? Profit earned from the code? We might have a subjective opinion about a programmer’s skill, relative to other programmers, but that’s hard to quantify. I think most skills present this kind of problem.
I don’t think any professional or technical skill lends itself to direct objective, quantitative evaluation. Instead we usually look at results and consistency. How we rank those factors for multiple people is partly subjective.
And you aren't right, there are many games where there are objective scores or measures of skill like other have said golf, darts, billiards. What leads to a field being more objective is the presence of scores which can be compared and serve as the goal, and the score outcome is not based on luck or opponent play.
I used a game as an example of something that permits objective and quantitative scoring. Professional and technical fields don’t work like that. Chess and darts and tennis do.
For "quantitative", assuming we're talking about STEM, I don't think many people would strongly defend any of the established measures (job interviews? performance evaluation? corporate pay scales? academic publication metrics?). I think the consensus among tech workers (maybe not their managers) is: it's all bad.
Now, for "objective", I would say it's also all bad, but there is bad and much much worse. In my limited experience, the larger and more experimental the field, the worse things get. Established mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists often agree on who is "strong" and who is not, in their community (they are at times all wrong). In software engineering, it's often even less clear. In astrophysics, you need to be in the right lab to do anything (maybe it is a skill?). In animal biology, you need lots of luck with your experiments (although poor ethics can sometimes help make luck happen). I'm joking here, but here's my very rough feeling: when success depends a lot on external factors, people underestimate those factors to varying degrees, adding tons of noise and bias to the consensus.
Significantly, none of my examples really are real world things - anything interesting always involves some element of chance that cannot be isolated from skill.
It isn't more objective than the "measured sports" mentioned in other comments, but it does have the advantage of its measures being mostly integers (eg. how many balls can you juggle? With one hand? Etc.), which means there is always a strict pass/fail test to "level up".
