This is true but there is a matter of being able to split up work into multiple pieces easily and prioritise between services. E.g. the piece of legacy service that nobody likes to touch, has no tests and is used for 2% of traffic can take its’ time getting sorted out without blocking all the other services moving on.
You still have to do it and it should be ASAP, but there are more options on how to manage it.
I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:
He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).
The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused… Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic… at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.
I think your example is great for how the messaging of “pick a job you love and you’ll never work a day”/“you can be whatever you want to be” can be quite harmful, I know several people in similar situations with various art/creative degrees.
The only thing I’d add is to consider what a degree will do for you if you can’t work in the field it’s for. E.g if you get a degree in marine biology it may be used to re-train as a teacher or similar, but not much else. Meanwhile a degree in some business subject will probably allow you to apply for most office jobs in general. You may not love it, but it’s a lot easier to have a decent salary and find a hobby than to starve trying to get paid for your hobby.