when you have a monetary incentive, this quickly falls apart. Either you need to focus on what people will pay for or what companies will pay you to do for them. That's sort of why I'm eternally stuck between keeping on top of engine knowledge (even though I have no plans to use those engines for my own game one day) while toying around with a Vulkan renderer here and there.

Graphics programming was already hard to hire into, and I'm not even convinced there's more than a few dozen legitimate positions out there in these times.