You can write meaningful, production-ready code if you have the skills. It seems like you have only worked at large companies, which is fine, but that is likel

You can write meaningful, production-ready code if you have the skills. It seems like you have only worked at large companies, which is fine, but that is likely the core of the "self-fulfilling prophecy" you mention in point #1. If you want to write production code, don't work somewhere that puts 5 levels between you and the deploy scripts.