Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision.
For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.
If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.
I have worked in restaurant kitchens (more on the higher end) and know very well that it can be hard work. But this is not at all the kind of work the "lunch ladies" are doing. In fact they have easy, predictable schedule, with a captive "clientele", low standard and very little skill or innovation involved. The people who end up there are just too bad to do anything else and in my experience they tend to be quite despicable actually.
In elementary school I had two extremely unpleasant lunch ladies who were vile and unsanitary. The "cooking" was just opening some canned or frozen food and reheating it. As anecdata, when they were serving ready-made "crepes", they would throw it in your plate from the cart that was rolling in the middle ailes, because that was less effort. If you were at the end of the table which was quite long (3-4 meters) you had better watch out for the reception if you wanted to actually be able to eat the damned thing.
Out of the 4 schools I frequented after, there was only one that had decent food and it was at dinner because it was a boarding school with a low headcount and the cook (a young friendly man) had more time to actually make some palatable things.
My experience is that most of the women working in those kitchen were very low effort people and often display some kind of low key evil in how they behave towards students. The food is bad because even if you were to give them the raw ingredients and tooling they would just make a mess of it. They are definitely not praise worthy.
No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well rewarded.
I don't fault people for doing jobs like this, it obviously pays and you can go home and do something else after it. But praising them for it seems utterly ridiculous.