I was never the best programmer and never was to keen on building things or providing some value to users. I'm more interested in how systems work, especially computers and the OS, and so far, LLMs haven't taken that away from me. If programming and solving problems had been important to me, I'd probably have a problem right now. While I feel for OP, what interests him most—namely, understanding things and developing an intuition for them—is not a productive activity in the sense that it’s not about building or producing things. But the job of a software developer has always been exactly that and LLMs take an ongoing trend to the extreme. I think people like OP have no choice but to separate their personal interests from their job, as hard that may be.

Interesting. You don't feel like you were building an edge with your understanding of said systems or OS?

I'm very interested in systems as well, but being less sure about the future (on whether this is something I really need to think about, or whether I'll get opportunities to work much at this level), I started reading about such topics a fair bit less.