I'd say the real world doesn't reward being actually gifted.

School rewards obedience and memorization. If you're aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you'll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.

Universities also reward memorization. If you're good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you'll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).

If you're gifted (like I'm actually certified to be, whatever that means), you're often bored at school, you won't learn because you don't really need to, and you don't really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that's extremely frustrating.

In the "real world" being gifted isn't really a huge benefit either. I'm good at what I'm doing and what's the result? I'm now de facto managing other people at doing what I'm good at. I can't complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I'm inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can't escape from.

And I think that's where many of the "gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath" people are at. Overqualified for what they're doing, but caught in a system where they can't really excel in the ways they could.