I think your attitude is right, and you just have to ignore the "what?!?! no side projects!?!?" people. I've known plenty of extremely competent engineers who

I think your attitude is right, and you just have to ignore the "what?!?! no side projects!?!?" people. I've known plenty of extremely competent engineers who either don't do side projects or simply don't want to invite their coworkers into talking about their personal lives. I do a ton of small side projects and I haven't been asked about any of them in interviews, nor have I advertised my github on my resume or anything like that. Out of all 9 members of my current team, the only ones I can remember ever talking about any side projects are the dev manager, who is obviously addicted to setting up tech stacks like he did when he was a developer (we recently compared notes about our experience using prometheus and grafana on home servers, for example), and one guy whose side project is a heavy metal band. Everyone else? Nothing I've been told about. Maybe they occupy their time with being a parent, or SCCA racing, or mountain climbing, or building dollhouses; I don't know and it's not really my business. I think there's a lot of value in being able to confidently say "yeah, I've got different hobbies <shrug>."