You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.
At my work in insurance solutions we're solving perabyte scale problems. We do not have a Rust developer in the team, but taught ourselves with the AI and now automating workflows which took days to under a minute now.
If you look at the speed a company rolls out new products/features, it should be obvious that "interesting ideas" especially good ones are infrequent and rare.
No offense, "using Rust to address a performance problem" is by no means novel or interesting. That is just another person's CRUD.
Look at how Meta's "ideas" turn out.
VR and metaverse surely sound like interesting stuff. Right? Right???
But the realm of what you can do with a computer is huge and working on the web is a very small part of it. Some other interesting part (for me) are OS development, network communication, computer architecture, embedded hardware and programming languages.