At least for me, this is exactly why I do personal projects. E.g., here's something random I did a couple weeks ago. It's so simple that it's almost embarrassing to post, but it's:

    100% vanilla Javascript
    no dependencies
    no cookies
    100% client side; no server side state, no ajax
    state is stored entirely in the URL
    state is correctly maintained across page loads (i.e. page edits its own URLs to maintain state)
    Javascript is 100% local, so it's instant and doesn't require any data fetch
    correctly detects a potentially spoiler-full page load by looking at the referrer (so it doesn't annoy you as you navigate around the site)
    ... and the entire thing is less than 100 lines of code

And it was surprising to me how genuinely fun this project was. I work on compilers/runtime systems for a living and I often get stuck in large code bases. I enjoy what I do, but working with a small codebase that's not massively overabstracted is just so fun.

https://exanderproject.com/spoiler-test/

The other thing that stuck me, as I was doing this, was how much the Javascript ecosystem has improved over the last 10-15 years. It was possible to do this in a very small amount of code with no dependencies precisely because of the all the bells and whistles that have been added to Javascript over the years. Maybe this isn't so obvious to someone who has been neck deep in Javascript for 15 years, but as someone who has been mainly in other languages, it was a very noticeable and dramatic improvement. The web platform is way, way nicer to develop for now than it used to be when I first got started.

Now I'm trying to figure out what other small projects I can get involved with.