I've come to realise that actually coding is the part of software development I enjoy the least, and in many staff software engineer positions, that is basically entirely what you are doing

Other people are doing the fun/interesting stuff, project managers, product owners, scrum masters, etc etc are doing all of the fun interesting figuring out/thinking, and then it's just your job to code it.

When you work on side projects, you get to wear all of those other hats and it's way more rewarding