If you really truly are interested in it as a career don't hold back, but know that it's a looooooong road for very little money and absolutely no guarantees. Like anything fairly creative, only the top percentile make actual good money (or even sustainable money), and even then you usually have to freelance and build your own reputation to get there. That said, there are viable adjacent jobs that use that skillset. I worked in corporate AV for a few years, which involves running sound, lighting, and video for events. It's far from glamorous though, and mostly involves manual labor in setups and teardowns. You're basically a roadie who also runs the gear, but instead of mixing cool rock shows you're mixing a few mics and a PowerPoint presentation for a pharmaceutical convention. The hours can also suuuuuuuck. My longest shift was 20 hours. I got home at 3 AM after that and then had to be back at the shop for 7. You live on free coffee and cookies that the banquet staff give you (you get to be on a first-name basis with every hotel banquet server in your city). It can be weirdly fun as a youngster but I have no idea how the older techs survived. I regularly worked 40 hour weeks when I was part time and 60-80 when full-time. I burned out by like 22.

The music store gig was really fun though. I ran the rentals desk and spent a lot of time teaching my customers how to use the pro audio gear. That's also the most ridiculous place I've ever worked in terms of memorable stories.

You can also run sound in a dive bar, but that's mostly about who you know and involves more networking than you'd expect to work in a dive bar for very little money.

As far as actually being a professional audio engineer or producer who makes a living making records - that's the real tough part. I suppose it's possible to land a staff job in a studio, but that's not really how it worked in my small city. I freelanced with my own gear and home studio for years until I met a (relatively - this is Canada) big-name producer who I'd built rapport with from my job in the music store. He offered to let me work out of his proper studio for a very reasonable rate. Note that this wasn't a job - it was an offer to pay him to use his facility. Still, it was the closest thing I had to a break and for a few glorious months I was (barely) scraping by as a full-time recording engineer. The clientele I had built up over the previous decade were almost exclusively local punk and garage rock bands, meaning none of them had money, and now they had to pay real studio fees on top of my own, so I was charging way too little. I was technically doing it though, but then I finally fully burned out - due in part to some looming personal issues - and that was that.

As to all your other comments - alllll of that can be learned through study and experimentation. I went to an overpriced school to learn the fundamentals, but a diploma like that means shit and you can learn it just as well on your own. With stuff like EQ you don't need to be able to instantly pick out a good/bad frequency fully by ear - there are little tricks for zoning in on what you're looking for (crank the gain on the EQ and scan the frequency range until you find the tone you're trying to get rid of, then turn it down. Hint: it's almost always the lower-mids making stuff sound muddy.)

This all being said, if you're interested in this stuff I suggest dipping your toes in as a hobbyist first. If it becomes your obsession maybe consider a career, but only if you'll be content working adjacent jobs rather than recording bands full time. Also, in case I didn't make it quite clear, there's a ton of networking involved. It's easier if you actually play in a band, as I did (you don't have to be good - just out there meeting people). I suppose it'd still be possible otherwise if you spend most of your free time at local shows and really get to know the musicians. Also, by the time I was getting in, home recording was a vibrant industry so wasn't just competing with other engineers for jobs - I was also competing with bands just doing it themselves. I'm sure that's only gotten tougher these days with cheap gear being so accessible.

I hope this doesn't come across as demoralizing. I just want to make sure you know what you're potentially getting yourself into. If you're hating your current industry, though, and this all sounds overwhelming, another approach is to find something tolerable but maybe not what you envisioned, and make the best of it. In creative fields work typically becomes your life as it's a constant grind to make ends meet and something that was once pleasurable inevitably becomes tainted by association. Some people have the emotional fortitude to survive under those conditions but I suspect they're few and far between. I've worked probably a dozen jobs in my life before landing in my current role. Depending on how you count it, I've been here about 11 years and I fully expect this will be the company I work at for the rest of my working life (in part because my family bought the business a few years ago after several of us had worked there for years). The job has nothing to do with anything I went to school for and is in an industry I have no personal interest in. But, the work itself is interesting and sometimes creative,. Most importantly, the people are good, so I'm about as happy as a person can be in a job. Keep yourself open to opportunities like that, if you can find them. Buying the business helped, but even before that I had pretty much accepted that I was a lifer because this was the first grown-up job I felt content in.