As a fellow developer I feel the same but then when I realize that the cost of building something cool like this as a hobby is very high(for me at-least), I feel like we are lucky enough to have picked a field where the cost of experimenting is close to zero.

As a middle ground, I've settled on home automation & hobby electronic projects with some micro controllers like esp32, rpi pico etc. It's worth a try for anybody itching to build something tangible.

PS: the total BOM cost for this cube project was around 2500 Euros.