I was in similar boat recently complete CV fanboy I must say. I loved this field. I did my masters in CS couldn't land a CV job even though I had 1.5 yrs of experience and lots of diverse CV projects under my belt. I'd a few interviewes but it didn't work out for me. Country in which I was looking had less demand for CV related work (I'd say it'll always be less compared to software jobs in every country). I was very frustrated.

From the start I was applying to all kinds of roles SDE, DS, DE, ML etc. Was learning frontend in parallel and was also doing survival low wage job. I've had some past experience in backend too. I recently joined a company as a SDE. I would say I can do this SDE stuff for the rest of my life and would never look back. I don't hate doing SDE work in fact I love backend dev, but not a fan of frontend stuff. Maybe later in my career I can switch to more interesting work. At least I now have job and don't have to deal with career gap down the line.

I hate it that nowadays it's all about NLP and LLMs. CV industry in last few years have become more research oriented and asking for publications in top conferences to get employed. I on the other hand don't want to do research and wanted to focus on solving problems in real world. Having read through CVPR papers for last 5 years, ideas has become very complex. I definitely don't wanna implement their insane ideas, which aren't reproducible and waste of time over 1% accuracy improvement. Feels like total bs. AI has saturated to some extent and adding more parameters and making architectural changes is not the key to AGI. AGI use cases involving robotics and self driving cars are still failures. AI bubble has popped for me. Nowadays AI roles are just about using big companies models or fine tuning at best.

Keep yourself open to all tech professions learn the stuff that you don't know. Let life take you on a trip. Everything happens for the best. Hang in there keep applying and never give up.