Ok, story time.

I'm a Sr swe, and because of some strange decisions by management, half my time or more is meetings where I've providing status updates on the project, or getting status updates on the project. I'm obviously expected to contribute to the project, but the only thing I get time to do is review code, test, and occasionally step in to help lesser experienced team members solve problems.

But the real problem? The project involves one of my key areas of interest in computer science, and I didn't have any involvement in designing the system. So I'm doing all of this work for a poorly designed system that I can point out all the limitations of it, can guide a work around, but because of the tech stack it literally will not be as effective as the customers dream of.

My lunch breaks and after work involve Factorio or Satisfactory where I have the power to do things right and fix when I need to. Without these games I probably would have lost my mind ages ago.