The clue is burried in the text of OP's article.

> Mathematicians can also consider wholly redirecting their skill sets to work on real world problems. I’ve actually been encouraging mathematicians to consider thinking about working on government or other large-scale societal issues.

The fact that this is a radical departure from the norm is part of why mathematics (and philosophy) is often seen as some intangible or ungrokable science to many outsiders, as they're generally approaching it from a perspective of "Okay, but why, what is this useful for?", and the answer "For the science of it" doesn't tend to land with people that aren't already passionate about said science/discipline and are just trying to figure out what it even is or involves.

Doesn't help that there is a pervasive sentiment in American Academia (not sure about elsewhere) about Math being *the* hard science, and I mean hard as in difficulty, so a lot of people get intimidated by it before they ever give it a chance very early on in their academic life and carry that through the rest of their education.

So there ends up being a rather small pool of people that are in(to) the field, and rather high friction for stimualting interest in it from outsiders from the way that it's taught, and a massive difference in the perspective of it's use between it's diaspora and the unmathed masses.

Mathematicians who do work on "real world" problems are mostly doing so with theoretical physicists, genomicists, and cryptographers. None of these count as what people consider valuable other than because they are hard.

That said, few 50 (or even 40) years ago would have predicted that completely abstract number theoretical computations about primes, discrete logarithms, and elliptic curves would be the foundation of our monetary system.