The short story is that I was becoming quite depressed about my job prospects after running my own web development company for more than 20 years, then starting a startup with a small amount of money and seeing it fail. I was interviewing for a lot of boring and fairly awful positions when I asked myself what I really wanted, and that was to work in games! (I've been playing them since we got an Atari VCS the year it came out. My mom worked for the chip company.)
I started applying to game studios for positions that used my web, API, and data skills. I've worked with JS, TS, JSON, SQL, and NOSQL for years and it turns out all games need some of that stuff. Any game that has inventory, an economy, or real users will need some kind of dashboard and platform tools to bring together that data and let the team manage it. Also, they need a public-facing website. So that's what I do in my current position, build and maintain both of those things for a AAA mobile game.
My favorite thing about being in the "plumbing" department, so to speak, is that I'm allowed to do my technical work in the way that I think it best. Having fewer people in the company involved in those languages and tech gives me more freedom and more of an architecture role and I think our products are better for it. I also love being on the inside and seeing how sausage is made. Games are a fascinating industry and in many ways different from business software and that's been fun to learn about.