Non-american here, but I feel pretty much the same way. I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine. A single educator in my child's kindergarten most likely does work that is orders of magnitude more important to society than mine is. Maybe this attitude comes from the fact that both of my parents never set a foot into higher education, but it is something I feel very strongly, and which is quite humbling.

I remember my father predicting in the early 2000s that the academic elite was increasingly crippling the country by adding more and more non-pragmatic rules in seek of some idealistic utopia, and that they would lose the support of the masses pretty soon. As a young teenager, I did not believe him, and in my arrogance of youth, I also dismissed it as the ramblings of an uneducated worker. But sure enough, most of the things he feared back then turned out to come true.