I have been thinking about something very similar for the last year or two now. Almost every white collar job I can think of has large portions of its workforce twisted into contributing to some fucked up aspect of the capitalist machine. The one that I think is really pernicious is the medical industry. I actually think it’s worse than defense in a way.
With defense there is kind of an upper limit to how much a company can probably charge for their product because how much more dead can the device make someone? On the medical side of things though, their products save or prolong people’s lives and the people in charge know that. They know that even if the improvement is only marginal, as long as there is one (and sometimes even if there isn’t one), they can probably extract as much money from people as they have.
There is a reason I specifically said white collar jobs/workers. I have a hard time thinking of a barista as contributing to the shitty things that Starbucks is responsible for, though I admit that is likely more of a me thing. Whereas a person working as a programmer for Starbucks or in Finance or HR, their work seems like it is much more directly complicit in supporting the shitty things Starbucks does like its active campaign against workers rights and unions.
Your line of thinking though is more or less inline with mine in the grand scheme of things and the importance of being intellectually honest and using whatever influence one may accrue (whether that’s money, decision making abilities, leading by example, etc.) to try and balance the scales positively. As long as there is any suffering in the world that we as individuals aren’t using all of our free time and resources to address then we are all hypocrites to at least some degree, and that’s ok, on an individual level. It’s not ok in the broader sense as it is often a result of capitalism and greed, but it’s ok to simultaneously recognize that we are all flawed and that we could all be doing better (admittedly some more than others).