Great insights Yo.
I was lucky to get that advice before making it to college. I insisted I wanted to design cars and an industrial designer who worked on bike parts told me how he worked at one of the big 3 designing the sun visors and airbag labels. And the chances of me working on minivan cupholders was infinitely higher than ever seeing a sports car in my career. I also “lucked” out in getting to work on a student team project with GM (pre-recession) where the designers came in, gave a really cool brief on designing an “Ariel Atom” competitor, and then as soon as they left the room the engineers said “No, you are not doing that. You are to design a hatchback”. Gave a good sense of how shitty of a work environment it was back then.