Not just you. Software development, especially web, is a very pretentious industry. I believe that itll be one of the first programming jobs that'll fall to AI

Not just you. Software development, especially web, is a very pretentious industry. I believe that itll be one of the first programming jobs that'll fall to AI if it happens someday (no, systen architecture is not some special, difficult skill only some of us can have as they'd have you believe). Embedded, OS, scientific programming, they do real work there. Take a magazine like POC||GTFO and see what real engineering looks like. Recently I came across a nice challenge there to write a program for which the compiled binary must be a palindrome. Good stuff. If you can afford, switch to something like embedded development. You'll probably make less in the short term but you'll get to keep your soul.