I think you assume most people want to compete with Unreal on visuals. That's of course borderline impossible. But getting a basic renderer and game loop going isn't really that hard, and likely won't be the majority of your game's code. Just doing drawObject() in a for loop is good enough, you don't have to think hard about optimizng if your game is simple enough, or all the concerns about resource streaming, binding optimizations or parallelism can come later if necessary.

> Building a game engine takes about two years to get to the My First Renderer point.

I wonder what starting point and success criteria do you assume for that 2 year timeline. About a year ago I wrote a deferred renderer with dynamic lights, and shadow mapping, and few post effects in about a month of free time (Less than a week of full time work).

> This is why most indy games now are 2D. That's do-able. Often in HTML/JavaScript.

I don't think that should count against them. Most serious works is done on 2D interfaces. And both WebGL and plain old 2d canvas are very capable nowadays. And quite a few hit indies are 2D.

> If you want a job, be aware that the game industry sucks

Sure but basically everything uses the GPU nowadays. Writing and debugging ML workloads, data visualizations, HUDs and just user interfaces in general requires some understanding more often than not.