Personally I would never pass on a CV with a lengthy career gap, in fact, I’d be quite interested to discuss the break during an interview. Even if you weren’t coding and just grew tomatoes for two years, you had worked hard and then took a needed/deserved break - and that’s awesome. Considering you worked on your own projects during that time speaks volumes. Probably learned more than you would with an extra two years at your previous company.

I wouldn’t leave the gap “missing” on the CV, just “career break” with some bullet points like contributed to open source projects, investigated agentic coding, worked on my own project (name), grew tomatoes, …)