And if that ever feels too corporate/safe, there's also fan game development/modding. The lack of legal ways to monetise your work there means that everyone who'd only be interested in the field for money is quickly filtered out, leaving only those willing to plow a decade or so of their life into something for no financial benefit.

Plus if you go back far enough, you can work on something where there's no room to abstract out anything and your code has to be optimised for the bare hardware itself, which is always an interesting challenge.

Yes, game dev and developing software for personal projects. Corporate world is insufferable.