I've done a lot of work that I think qualifies me for these jobs and have a public portfolio with side projects that took hundreds of hours and I think involve a fair amount of complexity, but I'm getting the impression that nobody really takes any of it seriously because they don't have thousands of users and I didn't scale a bunch of distributed servers to serve millions of requests per second in throughputs for live users. I want to keep working on them and hopefully be able to monetize them because I think these tools I'm building could potentially be successful with more work - but then a part of me feels like I should be working on something more "technically impressive" because interviewers don't seem to be impressed at all about your "CRUD" web app unless it's got a lot of traction (though if my apps had that traction, why the hell would I even be interviewing lol).
Good point on it being harder to showcase backend work - that actually does make me feel a little better. Backend work I think needs to be accompanied by an article explaining all the technical challenges, at which point I think many will still consider it more respectable than typical frontend work even if the former isn't any more challenging than the latter.
I'm also full stack btw, just more confident in my frontend because my "big company" experience was on the frontend. I redid my resume today. Will see what I can do to make myself more attractive. I never had any trouble finding work in the past, so I've been surprised at how much more difficult it has been this year.