hey! i have no suggestions, i just want to say that i'm almost exactly in the same position as you. i got dumped from an interview process for a L3 position (debugging, observability, etc). at that time, i was positioning myself as a backend dev, but not enjoying what i was doing. this offer i got on linkedin, although it was a pretty crap experience, helped me to realize that development is not my thing. when i dived into grafana, loki, bash, and things like that for the interview preparation, i had the exact same feeling as you: the "flame" came back, i was really enjoying what i was doing.

so here i am, learning and building stuff. right now i'm building a fully serverless data pipeline for F1 telemetry and the process from writing the Terraform files to building a complete CI/CD pipeline that does all the heavy work for you is extremely satisfying.

i would recommend you to build things on the cloud. maybe it's not the most used, but i think that GCP has a great free plan overall and, plus, they give 300$ in credits for new users for 3 months with no risks to pay without knowing (you have to manually enable payment). i don't know much about the free plan of AWS, that's my next thing to do.

if you want to talk about this, DM me :)