not to be antagonistic but are we paid to learn stuff or to build stuff? I think it's the latter. if we have to learn something it's only so that we can build something in the end.

That's just Stockholm syndrome. Your mind went straight to the job being soulless and coping with it.

I am absolutely paid by the hour to learn stuff. The things I'm learning are mostly messy business domain bits: how does our internal API work, who wrote it, what were the constraints, which customer requested this feature, how much SLA will we lose if we break it to hotfix this CVE...

Yes the end result is at some small moment in time a thing that was built. But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems. The software is a means to that end. Understanding the problems is almost the entire job.