I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you.
Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply specialized and focused only on programming, while they program to accomplish other tasks in their domain of expertise.
Can this last forever? Of course not, nothing lasts forever. But wondering why the wealthiest corporations in the world pay their workers high salaries is perhaps like wondering why water is wet. Software has a low marginal cost, and the rest is basic incentives for the corporations.
Although there is likely a better allocation of $1.1B in isolation, that is not the world in which this investment was made - $1.1B amounts to <5% of the annual DOE budget. It also does not include comparisons to other investments e.g. over $1B goes towards electric vehicle tax rebates every year [1]. Build Back Better proposed $555B of federal spending for renewable energy.
Are we going to discuss budgets in absolute dollar amounts, or discuss them as portfolios?
I will simultaneously applaud efforts to develop electric vehicles while applauding efforts to increase the MPG rating of an ICE vehicle. The same way, I'll applaud any serious effort to reduce our emissions at coal power plants that do indeed help load balance our somewhat fragile power grid - a fragility we need to address while also ensuring our existing infrastructure serves us well.
[1] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF11017.pdf