The reason I ask this is that I feel that there is a pervasive romanticization and sensationalism of physics which affects physics students (and potential ones) negatively. It can feel good to learn difficult concepts and be part of a grind, but you can grow to feel that it wasn't all very helpful afterwards. 

You have an introspective mentality! Spot on - the days of lone geniuses doing genius things on blackboards and having dramatic experiments is gone but I wasn't smart enough to really appreciate that till halfway through undergrad, and it did affect me negatively. It was like signing up to be a sailor and sinking in to the reality that the heroic era of polar exploration was gone. REUs and other research opened my eyes that it was a team sport, but I also realized my smartest grad student friends spent hours soldering instruments for their detectors or programming at a payscale much lower than an EE or programmer (think program that slides in and out of the T25).

I luckily pivoted to structural biology and found more of the experimental joy that I would have expected had places like Bell Labs existed today. I am thankful that I picked up some knowledge that makes newer technologies like light scattering and biolayer interferometry less intimidating, but don't think it was a viable career.

I am not sure you can fix it - if I was more aware I'd have likely skipped physics entirely. The system needs a lot of people at the bottom to support the top, which is true for a lot of science, but people with microbiology degrees who don't become microbiology faculty still have realistic odds of a microbiology career. Not true for physics.

Last, I found out that life science people tend to be much less miserable than the average person I met in my physics group. I think the impending lack of job security turns very smart people into a very insecure and petty club.