Exactly right. That’s why the joke “There are 100 game engines written in Rust… and 5 games” is so funny. Programming nerds love the engine stuff more than the art stuff. I know I fall in to this category.

Arguably the reason is making a game engine is easier than making a game. Obviously creating all of Unity/Unreal is a ton of work. But, to make a game engoine you have a checklist of features (gameloop, rendering, audio, input, ...) each of which you can break into smaller features. It gives you a free todo list, each item on the list has generally known solution, and makes it feel like you're making lots of progress as you check things off and see systems come up. That progress feels great. And you are making progress but you're making progress making a game engine, not a game.

A game on the other hand is a blank sheet. There is no checklist. It's way harder to make progress on a game.

After bouncing off of Unity the first few times, I finally decided to commit to it after trying out some of the JS game frameworks (like Phaser)

Absolutely worth it, have made lots of games in Unity just for myself that feel pretty polished, there are just so many systems to make a game work.

The advice around game engines kind of seems like "to learn how to write programs first create the compiler.

Not to say all games should be made in engines but it certainly helps.