Web dev is absolutely a shitshow, but it wasn't necessary to learn all of it to have high paying job. There were plenty of jobs where you could specialize in frontend, backend, infra, data... even subsections of those. And yet a lot of those people still learned the bare minimum they needed. They wouldn't bother to learn the languages they were using every day deeply, and they wouldn't learn their tools deeply (editor, git, etc). I knew plenty of those people. If you were doing true fullstack then you sure, you have a bit of a point, but many people did not, at least at the places I worked.

Nothing prevents you from just using the lower layers of abstraction. I have developed a few games using Raylib and it was really fun.