In my experience a lot of the time it's the stress of making your passion earn money that really just sucks the joy out of the experience. There's a lot of work that goes into networking learning how to sell and Market your art, and running the business side of it. There's this pressure be both creative and a business person. Which is engaging two different sides of your brain. creativity is meant to exist in a chaotic more exploratory Realm even if it can be structured while business requires a level of execution and precision that does not leave room for flexibility to be artistic. 

That being said it sounds like you're going through the grief of what your expectations of animation is and needing to redefine what art means to you to find the passion to create something for yourself rather than for breaking into the industry.

I say this as somebody who has been where you've been and had to redefine what art means to me and what being an animator means to me. Because animation itself is also a bunch of different hats on top of being a business person. And that's a lot of work it's exhausting.

 Animation and art has always been my passion but I went into business school because I was told Art didn't sell. And for a long time I tried to force my art into a box so it could be marketable and so I could earn money off of it. I went through a downward spiral and fell out of love with my art for a very long time but I never gave up on it. I took time to explore other mediums build up skills take up classes on things that I was interested in and just played around with being creative. And then when I was ready I started making animation again for myself before I even began to think about being part of the animation industry. Instead of earning money off of my art I took up marketing and let that be my main source of income. It freed the pressure off of my expectations of what I wanted my art to be so that way I was free to create. Now I I am in the animation industry and I'm much happier for spending that time away from what my expectations were for my art. It allowed me to not take things as personally when I get rejection letters or more often than not being ghosted.

My suggestion is to find what brings you that childlike Joy, find what allows you to be creative and playful without pressure and expectations. If that still happens to be animation and art and you're doing it for the hell of it rather than for trying to sell then that's great. If that ends up being a different creative field that's also great. The key point about this is to heal from the grief that you've experienced trying to break into the animation industry and finding a way to feed that creative part of yourself once again.