Perseverance is not rewarded in software, at least not in JavaScript. The key reason is that there is no trust. Employers do not trust the competency of the developers and the developers do not trust each other. The result is that the work is typically extremely beginner and developers are not expected to write original code aside from trivial React components. Everything else, I mean this literally, is a downloaded NPM package because there is substantially greater trust in anonymous strangers than your coworkers. If you are interested/capable of doing more you aren't compatible with current hiring trends and will not be hired.
In all fairness though if you can get hired in a low cost of living market for 170k knowing almost nothing about how the software or the platform really work doing beginner chores then why bother persevering with hard work to be anything more? Eventually most of these people will elevate to management where their technical experience is irrelevant anyways.