Personal anecdote but doing over a decade of personal projects in game and web development, starting in middle school, did nearly jack shit for me as far as eve

Personal anecdote but doing over a decade of personal projects in game and web development, starting in middle school, did nearly jack shit for me as far as eventually getting a job was concerned. If I were to go back and do it all over again I would definitely spend my time doing literally anything else. I was so convinced that if I just followed my fancy, worked hard and made cool stuff, learning anything and everything I could along the way, then eventually I would find work doing things I liked, formal degree be damned. It did not work out that way, at all. After years of searching for work in the Redmond area and failing to do so (because, no professional experience, no degree), I randomly happened to find work by randomly logging onto a forum I hadn't visited in years and randomly happened to find a thread where a guy was looking to hire for remote webdev contract work. After that contract was complete, I spent another couple years looking for further work, and had to eventually move back home away from Redmond because the cost of living was too high while I was unemployed. After plural years of searching again, I finally managed to get a second remote webdev job. I don't like modern webdev and would much rather do almost anything else but now I've had two jobs doing it and I feel despair—am I locked into this for the rest of my career? With no degree and only these two jobs' worth of "Professional Work Experience" under my belt, it sure seems that way. Recruiters and hiring departments seem to care about little else. They sure don't give a shit about any personal projects, in my experience. And this is even in spite of the fact that I more or less picked a new language and/or framework for each project, which, in my mind, shows an aptitude for learning new things, being adaptable, and having an above-average "general programming aptitude" than someone who's made fourteen React projects in the past couple of years or whatever. But apparently companies don't see things this way, or maybe I'm just not good at finding the ones that do, or maybe there's something else to my approach that has been All Wrong. But as my twenties draw to a close and I find myself no closer to finding a career than I was a decade ago, at this point I'm kind of at a loss for what to do about it. And, almost more importantly, I'm extremely burned out on making stuff just for the fun and intrigue of doing so.