I had a similar experience as the OP (but I never was anything close to the 10x developer) but in my case, I recovered my passion for programming, but in differ

I had a similar experience as the OP (but I never was anything close to the 10x developer) but in my case, I recovered my passion for programming, but in different ways. Back in the day in 2005-2014 I got inspired by several folks around the world and looking back there are some characteristics of all those folks (i) they had a great sense of craftsmanship, (ii) they had a certain level of autonomy to build and they were "listened" in some of the engineering decisions, and (iii) most of those folks are shielded against meta-work (e.g. corporate bloat meetings, bureaucracy, low-value processes/corporate rituals, etc) because they were doing something special that talks with the customers/clients to understand them to build something meaningful. In my experience, unfortunately, the (ii) and (iii) are the norm and the end product is the vanishing of the (i). The software development profession changed with more tools accessible to more people, lots of people have access to the SOTA in code generation/assistance, and we had things unthinkable for our predecessors like version control systems, CI/CD, infrastructure as a code, containers and so on, but most of the corporate developers like me are constrained by the environment where not only we have that corporate iron ball on the foot, but we're every day more distant from the clients/customers. I used to be frustrated due to that, and I ended up fired twice because I naively fought against it, but at the end of the day I channel my craft into my hobby/pet projects or when I do something for my family (for instance, I was using a small script to automatic schedule Hemodialysis for a cousin that has a kidney problem).