Money isn't the issue for civil servants

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In reality, people who complain about low wages—whether they've tried investing, streaming, or doing whatever they wanted and saw some results (or even failed)—don't usually make that kind of noise.
Or, those who started early, before the age of 25, rarely complain about the low pay.
It's only those who graduated from mediocre universities, studied their lives away, and finally became civil servants in their 30s after years of exam preparation who keep whining about the low wages.
Those who couldn't do what they actually wanted and just followed what everyone else was doing, only to see poor results, tend to be the ones with the most complaints. Those who tried everything they wanted to do before joining don't have much to complain about; my friends are like that too.
The real problem is that in many cases, the corporate culture is actually worse than that of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These days, unless it's a field-work-based company, most SMEs don't have a culture that is significantly worse than that of civil servants. While it's true that job security is low and the pay is stingy compared to the workload, there are many local governments and job series where the internal culture is unimaginably backward.
In places where this is less of an issue, scores are already recovering (e.g., educational administration, national civil service). Especially for men, there are still many places where a culture of blatant condescension and being treated like a servant remains, which is actually worse than many SMEs. This is why new recruits are quitting. In fact, SMEs don't really have that "serving the seniors" culture, even if the issues there are job security or pay relative to workload.
To be blunt, being a civil servant is no longer a "work-to-play" job, and I don't think it's a job where the pay is necessarily bad. It's just that many local government positions, which make up the majority of lower-level civil servants, have such nonsensical cultures that they get criticized. That culture is fundamentally incompatible with what is known as "MZ culture."