Eight years isn't very long at all. Many of us love programming, 20, 30, or even 40 years later. It's the challenge of making a lump of metal do exactly what it is that you want it to do.

In the beginning, I thought that playing computer games would be great. They aren't. I find them boring because they can't give me the challenge that plain old programming can do.

Eight years. <grin>

That reminds me of the story of the city boy who met an old moonshiner and proceeded to tell him that he drank a bottle of hard liquor a day.

The moonshiner replied "A bottle? Hell, I spill more'n that!"

Programming is not dead. The point you make about write once, run infinite is exactly what machines and LLMs fail at.

The booking press didn't kill literature, neither did napster kill music.

If you feel stuck in your career path and watch people burn out - coding has lots of opportunities to get into philosophy and other arts. Feeling stuck just means it's time to get in touch with those.

All the best on your journey!