The thing is that you seem to have that luxury to be able to dig more into the problem and scratch that itch.

But the industry is changing around you fast.

If MIT-bred devs were already building crap in faang before, the trend has been getting nothing short of worse across the industry.

Expectations are rising, the field is becoming a rat race of which engineer can output the most mediocre/acceptable/good enough amount of features in the least time as possible.

Let me make this clear: you're in an increasingly rarer bubble where you have a luxury that is disappearing in this industry, plain and simple.

I have the fortune of having stellar devs around me, people that contributed to projects and software you use every day.

They are also outputting magnitude of order more than they ever did, and none of them is getting genuinely better at the craft, but it is what it is.