I might be speaking from an unfair vantage point, but working for the largest cloud company has its perks, namely, the tooling that deal with exactly the proble

I might be speaking from an unfair vantage point, but working for the largest cloud company has its perks, namely, the tooling that deal with exactly the problem that you described. While some CRUD is still necessary, most of that is abstracted away, we still have to be schema conscious, but since 1. Our team is dedicated to one back end product. 2. We have a lot of resources (and demand), we had to spend a lot of time thinking about more complex (and interesting) problems with scaling, distributed computing etc. It's a blessing for me because I'm sure if I was in a place where I need to be responsible for all part of the stack the job would turn into a mundane grind. But it's not just for work, I've been able to turn some of the stuff I learned into private projects and make them more interesting and less CRUDly.