Just look into the ultra distance / bikepacking community. It's pretty varied when it comes to both frames and groupsets. Specially once You get into some more extreme events (e.g. Tour Divide for MTB or TransContinental for more of a road stuff, but the scene is growing pretty fast these past few years).
Personally, I'm on a 2018 steel Kona Rove (~1200Eur bike back in 2018) that I'm currently upgrading to an electronic groupset with hydro brakes. Reason for that is simple hand fatique / "cyclist's palsy" over long distances.
I also have a head unit, simply because of the GPS track that I usually try to follow. Gearing info is a bonus, but knowing the state of battery is pretty useful.
With regard to the "cyclist's palsy", that was the injury that surprised me most - I was expecting to get sore legs, not hands! I found a pair of gel gloves helped a lot for cycling on terrain where I needed to keep my hands on the handlebars, but whenever I was on a flatter surface I just changed my position to lean on the bars with my elbows. Same thing when I got a bad neck crick, I just rested up for a day or two and then changed my riding position. I'm sure a better or more personally-adjusted bike would've been way more comfortable, but it wasn't impossible to ride long distances without it.
I think a lot of the specialized equipment is more about optimizing away inconveniences, which is great, but it's not really necessary outside of a race or "keeping up with the group" situation. If you want to tour solo, it's perfectly possible to just make do with whatever junk bike you have access to and adapt your route and behavior to the tools you have. I think when you start spending significant amounts of cash money on optimizing away the inconveniences, that's when you have entered a different class of cyclist. When you go to bike stores it often seems like all the cyclists are of that class, because all of the equipment for sale seems to be geared to them. But in the mechanic shops, I personally found it to be more balanced in the other direction. I guess there is a really large group of people who never go to a bike store and just buy department store bikes or reliable and easily-maintainable second-hand gear that the hobbyists have moved on from.
These days, having a reasonable job / salary, it's a trade-off in which I have much more of a choice.
GPS / head unit is a mean to have the overall route visualized. Can You substitute by a printout of major cities / crossroad names as an itinerary? Sure. Been there, done that too. Is the GPS worth 200Eur for me? Yeah, it is, just by the time I save not having to fiddle with maps on every stop.
When it comes to palsy, there isn't one silver bullet to solve it all. It's much like any RSI in that respect. Body position, muscle conditioning, stretching, general ergonomics. The electric shifting is just one of them (definitely not the first on my list). But since the cost of getting it wrong is maybe a month of limited fine motor control of my hand(s)... I really don't regret spending an extra few hundred bucks.
Does that mean I have bulk discount at Rapha? Hell no.
That's what I mean by things being less binary than "cheap mechanical bikes" vs "expensive carbon / electrical / Rapha jerseys". I know that there are plenty of people who fit one or the other case, but there's also quite a few of us who are somewhere in between.
If You'd like, maybe try checking out "Path Less Pedaled" (a youtube channel). Clickbait : "What You will see may surprise You!" ;-)
To be fair, I also work in the tech industry and could afford snazzier equipment, but I leaned toward keeping everything cheap and cheerful so I didn't worry too much about it getting stolen in town, or busted up when taking some questionable cross-country "shortcut". At the end I donated all my gear to a local co-op, then bought a new bike in the next country, so it also helped me feel more free and not bound to a pricey piece of hardware. I feel like spending money makes you need to spend more money - now you need a better lock, now you need a storage unit, now you need to take your bike on the plane etc. For me that's just more stress that would get in the way of my goal, which was to travel carefree.
I get your point about the utility of electronics, though. I'm not anti-tech, I guess I just tend toward cheaper and simpler solutions unless there is a very strong motivation. I don't think I'm especially unique in that sense - I think a lot of people (even those who own bicycles) would be surprised to hear that some cyclists nowadays are using electric shifters! I'm sure at some point the tech will trickle down to the mainstream, but in the context of this thread which was about someone thinking of retiring to become a bike mechanic but worried it'll just be like retiring to do the same tech job they just left... I think that future is still far enough off in the distance that it's not something people who are thinking about retirement at the moment need to worry about.
