I feel your pain. My career happiness peaked around 2014 or 2015, when I was writing Rails monoliths. I felt like I could focus 100% of my energy on business logic since the framework was so opinionated and the stack was simple. Things went rapidly downhill after that, once microservices, SPAs, node.js, NoSQL, and serverless computing started becoming popular. Everything just felt like a step backward. Microservices made simple things (like transactions) impossible. Express felt like a degraded version of Sinatra. NoSQL, frankly, is utterly pointless, and I have no clue why it ever caught on. Serverless computing is interesting in some respects but the places that I've worked that have gone all in on AWS were total disasters. SPAs are definitely useful for rich, interactive front-ends, but the trend to make everything a SPA and render everything in JS is totally nuts.
I ended up switching to a PM role, where I can focus on the business problems without having to worry too much about the implementation. I do miss coding a bit, but it's not fun enough to do full time anymore.
I ended up switching to a PM role, where I can focus on the business problems without having to worry too much about the implementation. I do miss coding a bit, but it's not fun enough to do full time anymore.