It depends a lot on what you work with. I am a much younger generation of game programmer (only 15 years of professional experience), but a lot of the work I do has a similar feel.

Not saying that most game programming is like that, but if you specialize in graphics and performance, preferably in large productions, you get to work close to the hardware and solve a lot of really fun problems in interesting ways.

You can do that now - and id argue its even easier to get into it.

WebGPU in a browser is worth the learning curve - and gives you the same interface then in Rust!

When you sniffed that sweet sweet shader code and memory layouting - why not get into WebAssembly?

You can have sth very similar to an OS in your browser if you want. It's a lot of fun and knowledge actually useful instead of the next hypecycle of frameworks and dialects.

These days if you want to get esoteric you can do it in GPU shaders; https://www.shadertoy.com/ provides lots of fun examples with code.

Or there's MCUs with programmable IO for bit-bashing protocols.

I guess my equivalent these days is optimizing distributed services - a small change here, a realization there and you can save whole percentages of performance in affected services when effectively DDoSing yourself.

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