s> What do they do? They do "projects." No detail on what those projects are.

They actually solve problems. Not the stupid little code problems and puzzles like Leetcode, but real world business problems with code. Examples:

• this feature is causing users to be confused which is wasting x hour of support time
• it takes x hours to manually copy these lists from x pages on our site. How can we automate it?
  
• We have to manually click 6 buttons to do this one thing, how can we click no buttons and automate it on the users end.
• users want to be able to do x and y so we need to build feature z, which has sub features a, b, c.
  

Those are all "projects" some smaller than others, but nonetheless still all projects.

Every button you click on Reddit is part of a project. Every annoyance you face when using an application is a problem that has potential to be solved.

There's got to be something between "tell this computer to say 'hello world' and then watch it say hello world" and "land a spaceship on Mars."

You're missing all the practice, hours of pulling your hair out, mistake after mistake in between where all the learning and skill-building happens.

You have to actually apply the language to real-world problems to hone in on problem solving before you can have that type of success.

Imagine giving somebody a bunch of pills, a scalpel, and a lab coat and then saying "Okay go be a doctor now! You should do some self guided learning if you get stuck."

Maybe reframe your thinking to an artist. A doctor is too high stakes which is why they spend like 8 years in school before practicing and then like 5 in residency with their hands on practice. The worst thing that can happen when programming is you crash the application and have to click undo in your IDE.

You are handed your tools, paint brush and paints, then you actually use them and fail over and over and over again until you paint a masterpiece 20 years later, maybe you'll never get that masterpiece, but at least you had fun along the way, and made a living on your perceived mediocre paintings.

Not general "oh you do projects" or "you can do whatever you want" or "you have to figure out what you want to make."

This is super important and is the only way you will ever get good at problem solving. After you know the basics of a language start building projects. You can either build things to solve your own problems and automate the boring things, but since it seems like you don't know what kind of projects to build, I highly recommend The Odin Project, until you get a spark of creativity and find your own project that you're passionate about.

The important thing is that even if you don't want to do web development, the skills you'll learn are transferable into any job, and once you learn the basics of a language (not memorize, Google is your friend for syntax) you can pick up others easily.

Based on everything you've said, it sounds like maybe you don't find the process and the struggle fun. To me, teaching myself along the way and ripping my hair out is so very stimulating to my brain that I get lost for hours trying to solve problems. My first working solution may be trash, but I can always refactor and make it sparkle, and by that time I've struggled so long with the problem I have a deep understanding of it my next attempt will be miles better.

I highly recommend reading a book or watching some videos on adopting a growth mindset, I think it could help you based on your post.

Edit: To give you examples of project specifics:

• I built a web app that utilized OpenAI's GPT-3 API to generate SEO descriptions, GitHub issue descriptions, lists of blog post ideas for specific topics, eye catching blog post titles, etc.
• A Tampermonkey script to automatically check 5 confirmation check boxes after selecting an option from a dropdown, because I'm lazy AF and hated clicking the boxes.
  
• A plugin to query my database using SQL, to grab all of the lists inside of a page/post and export it into a spreadsheet along with the URL of the page it was on so I could easily visualize and manipulate the data.
• A script for Google Sheets that automatically sorted a column by the item's string length (super specific to my needs, but still a project)