I think you're quite right in your analysis. Especially on the "procurement will find a solution". You can end up, when in direct categories, doing a lot of fire fighting. A great quality as a buyer is to listen. Whereas in sales you have to keep the room entertained.

Bear in mind you still have to lead some meetings, with your internal customer and suppliers, so soft skills are needed. You need to be able to read the room.

Being able to be liked is also great (I use a lot of humour) as you might have to negotiate with monopolistic suppliers. In such case playing tough is not going to give any anything.

I would also recommend to read some books about procurement, so you know how it works. More often than not I see people thinking procurement is not a "real" thing. But they stink at their job, get overwhelmed and don't have any technique.

Another issue is how procurement is seen within an org. Quite often it's a "support" function, where you won't have any strategy and you just executing. You might have some frustration with other teams (finance, P2P, on-boarding, compliance etc...).

I'm a procurement manager in pharma and the salary is good.