Maybe philosophy is so needlessly wordy and impenetrable because it’s just people that weren’t smart enough to see it as a dead end

Quite a few philosophy undergrounds go on to law, business, and marketing, because the underlying concepts tie so well together. Lots of philosophy grad CEOs and heads of Law Firms. Some of the richest people in the country majored in philosophy.

Egyptology is significantly more niche. But it should be noted that we used to have a significant amount of money going towards archeological research. That's money state governments and private institutions have pulled back fairly recently.

We get to play this game with a lot of niche professions. There's a huge demand from back in, say, the 80s or 90s and then a huge structural shift to stop doing astrological research or civil engineering or sociology or education or whatever. All the money gets dumped into state subsidies for bitcoin miners. And then we call the folks who matriculated through those real professions "stupid" while smugly insisting the future is in digitally jerking ourselves off.