This is how most chefs lives look like. They prepare the same meals from a menu under time pressure years after years. Maybe it's not flipping burgers in fast food, but there is little space for artisanship in the food industry. You have to be really good to do more than prepare the same thing over and over from a menu.
This is true for brewers too. Beer is endlessly fascinating with the amount of variables to tweak, but working in a brewery is a fairly routine process of reading the recipe and executing then same steps over and over.
At a brewery, or a restaurant for that matter, aren't you there to basically recreate a product based on a recipe someone else formulated? The person tasked with creating the recipe has the opportunity to practice artistry in this scenario, but they, too, may be under business related pressure.
You're right, even the recipe makers can't escape business pressure to make undesirable products. With the hard seltzer craze going on (in the US at least), a lot of brewers are starting to make it. They didn't get into brewing to make hard seltzer, but they can't ignore the fact that they will sell well and are cheap to produce.
Isn't any job is like that? I guess even super-duper-romantic jet fighter pilot will spend most of his time doing paperwork and explaining seemingly obvious things to the higher ups.
I think this is why so many people fantasize about owning a business; it seems to allow for the most "vision oriented" work, which is what most people find enjoyable. Even that has its limits though, as there's just different kinds of drudge work involved.
But in most restaurants, the chef will chose which item to put on the menu, no ? They may repeat themselves every day but they get to change the menu from time to time.
