I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing.

Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much.

I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.