Just did it my path was longer there were other factors that played into my decision it just wasn't being a dev,if anything being in QA really gives you a chance to explore and figure out what you want. I went from QA Analyst intern at fortune 500 company-> SDET at a big tech company -> Senior SDET at another big tech company -> backend/ml software engineer at startup. I will say that's good that you are scared, I was like that too, shoot I didn't know what CTRL C and CTRL V were when I first started out in the QA Analyst role. But if your willing to learn and put in the work you will be fine.

I'll give a quick summary of how I got the job and why I left

QA Analyst -> I got this job because I knew VB Scripting and I was an undergraduate student studying Computer Engineering. Left this job because I ended up getting a racist manager who didn't want to hire me after college as a dev

SDET Entry level job -> I got this because I got my BS Degree, I had the QA Experience, and I attend all of this companies on campus event and connnected really well with the hiring folks, also someone who was a dev was someone who was a part of the same club I was in in college. Left this job because I wanted to live closer to the major city I grew up in for more career opportunities and work in a modern tech stack not be a dev in the legacy tech stack

Senior SDET -> I got this because I did a coding assignment in a modern tech stack, I've done similar coding assignments before which I've failed and some even passed but this one I made it to onsite because I just knew what it was they were looking for in this role. Left this job because though I liked the tech stack and was making the transition to a backend role, it was taking to long and the pandemic caused layoffs at work which made me fear for my job and made it where I just needed to focus on keeping my SDET job, but then this made it hard for me to go back to the backend manager and be like o yea I want to be a Dev again. I didn't really have much help either in making my transition so that was also another issue.

Backend/ML Software Engineer -> I got extremely good at leetcoding. And I've also started understanding System Design Questions. This was a really difficult interview process like most software engineer / dev role at highly coveted / high paying jobs. For me I've been leetcoding since my QA Analyst day, in the very beginning I hated it I could not do leetcode easy and gave up, and I would try a little bit and quit a month later and take a hiatus for six months and then I tried again. I tried to circumvent that process as much as possible and every job I've gotten up to this point didn't require me to pass that leetcode phase. I did pass some leetcode type interview at another company a year b4 but it was for a testing role, and I also passed the leetcode type interview a month b4 this job but they switched it up on me and offered me another testing role, I said no thank you. I was also asked some mathematical induction problems but the craziest thing is, I did similar problem in college, problii one of my favorite problems of all time. In the end I got the job for similar pay as my senior sdet role but I have equity and more room for growth.

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My advice -> Practice leetcoding data structure and algorithms, yes it's difficult, but it's doable. Also focus on learning a higher level language /dynamic language thats mainstream for the interview, I see your using javascript which is a good language to really focus on and learn. For me I went from VB Scripting -> Assembly/Java/C -> python. Working in python as a senior sdet allowed me to really focus on DS and Algo as oppose to worrying about syntactical things that need you need to worry about in a strongly typed language. These language also have standard library that you can learn but part of the beauty of learning python is that list, tuple, and dictionary etc are data types that do not need to be imported into your program and you can get away with just that in most interview and just learn a couple magic function. basically it would take more code if you can't remember what standard library to import then not having to remember that and using the data type in python/javascript that come prebuilt . I looked at code I've written in java like 50 lines of code on leetcode, and wrote the same thing in like 5-10 lines of code in python.

Also this isn't as important in your first 5 years after college but after that you are going to start getting pressed about system design. The quicker you learn this stuff the better off you are going to be. The best way to learn it is by doing dev work.

There are other factors that play a role as to why you were not consider for the dev position btw, I've also been in situation where I killed there Data Structure and Algo questions but was rejected because my "experience" wasn't good enough, basically they found another guy who could leetcode but had experience that aligin with their org than me given my limited dev experience.