I'm not anywhere near that level anyways. It's definitely a straight hobby for me, that I started with the idea of having shots for photogrammetry and other types of image processing and went down kind of a rabbit hole of just enjoying chasing birds (and bees, and butterflies), for the sake of the mechanical challenge. Getting from seeing something with your eyes to a balanced, focused shot is genuinely hard on its own. It would be cool to play with some of those $5k (or $50k) lenses, but one $500 lens every few years is way more in line with my budget.
But I'm not a huge fan of just being at crowded events drowning in people (again, sports are an exception, because the focus is the game), so the stress of needing to get a lot of really good shots and capture unique, irreplicable moments on top of that would definitely not be fun. And being customer service on top of that, another job I'd hate?