I'm coming to the realization that there's almost no point in spending time on a lot of the things that I love about being a developer: learning new languages,

I'm coming to the realization that there's almost no point in spending time on a lot of the things that I love about being a developer: learning new languages, studying best practices for your tech stack, reading software engineering books, becoming involved in tech communities, keeping up with the latest trends. Interviewers don't value any of that beyond lip service. The only thing worth spending time on is leetcode grinding, it can be worth 10s of thousands of dollars. The attitude of the algorithm geniuses is that software engineering is easy and anyone can learn it, which might be true, but my point is that I already did learn it and I spent five years becoming an expert in it. That should be valuable to your business whether you look down upon it or not.