I, like many hobbyist gamedevs, have: 1) built fully bespoke games, 2) built my own game engine, 3) built games using low-ish level libraries (like phaser.js),

I, like many hobbyist gamedevs, have: 1) built fully bespoke games, 2) built my own game engine, 3) built games using low-ish level libraries (like phaser.js), 4) used game engines. I offer this history to show that I too enjoy writing my own code. But I love Godot. I struggled with it too, at first, but probably around hour 6 of messing around, it all just clicked: Godot is actually a visual abstraction of object oriented programming. You get to write and extend visual classes, then instantiate them in scenes. Once it clicked, I realized this is exactly what I wanted. An engine that knows how to do physics, 2d, 3d, etc, and gives me very fine grained control over how objects in this universe behave (basically, anything you can code, you can attach to a node). So based on what you wrote above, I think you would actually like Godot. There is a steep learning cliff, but once you get past that Godot lives at just the right level of abstraction. Doesn't do too much, but does the stuff you shouldn't have to worry about.