I graduated college shortly before you started and the landscape wasn't all that different when I graduated than when you started. Yes, a good part of any job is just data/crud plumbing but there are interesting and challenging problems to solve even if you're not at a FAANG. Sometimes you got to find and fix them yourself. The one thing that I love now that I'd didn't have early in my career is the tooling! Just having the right programming and debug options is huge and I feel like I was in the Dark Ages in the early to mid aughts compared to now. As for the cubicle/office change, that might be moot now with move to WFH.