You can absolutely work as a professional writing code for 20 years and never work on a large software project or a project with a large team.

I worked on a small team at a government contractor that never used version control and deployments were an rsync from the lead engineer’s laptop to the cloud, this was in 2020.

There’s a lot of industries like bioinformatics or journalism where there’s people who are adept at writing code but who are not doing software engineering.