You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.

Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.

It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.

Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.

Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.

Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.

My grandfather was tenured, published voraciously up until he retired at 73, and was sorely disappointed when I chose not to follow in his footsteps and go into academia. Why? Primarily because I had to hear him gripe about how poorly the school administration treated him and his colleagues, culminating in him having to sue the university several times for the same reasons (and him winning every time in arbitration- he basically tripled his retirement savings).

I have a lot of respect for academics, but the culture around the administration of higher learning is putrid.