It's not cynicism, sadly.

There are a ton of jobs that are tool-heavy, and the "solving problems" only applies to a small percentage of the team.

Some problems should not exist at all and only exists because of the tooling chosen.

Example: A friend of mine works at a company that is running their business on some clown-ish cloud infrastructure, and their SREs have to basically re-invent the wheel to work around the limitations of the cloud vendor the management has chosen (for example: no virtual machine autoscaling, in a cloud environment). Somebody at that company is certainly doing "creative work" and "solving problems" with code, but not those SREs.

It can, but parent's cynicism is very understandable if one looks around at the hot new exciting technology of today and compares it to the hot new exciting technology of decades past. Pretty much the entire high-paying tech space right now is either solving non-problems or actively creating and promoting problems.