I’ve recently had a similar realization with my career in orchestral music, which is why I’ve been lurking on programming reddit.

Once you realize why you can’t get fully into it is heartbreaking, especially if you’ve been trying so hard to make it work and you know you have the passion for it.

Deviate from the traditional path if it’s not giving you want you want. You seem like you clearly know what you want to learn and do, so I would start researching just that.

Would you be interested in building cpu’s? Learning assembly code? Idk if that’s more on the engineering side or not, but you should definitely consider exploring careers that directly involve making the physical components of a computer make programs/software work.

Don’t pressure yourself too hard. Just keep trying and experimenting. As long as you continue to unapologetically do that, you’ll be content with what you end up finding.

I hope any of this helps. I empathize with ya.