It's limiting and can be frustrating, yes.
Apex and aura components are not transferable directly, but what is is learning how to work with enterprise software. Plus, my bred and butter with Salesforce work is integrations, which has given me plenty of opportunities to learn other languages as needed to get the work done.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stabilizing-salesforce-lightn...
If I created an angular app here, a react app there, and elm lang app over there, you are dramatically increasing the overhead to maintain the org. IMO, it's better to play it safe by using Salesforce's tech stack so your client has an easier time maintaining their org in the future. Future Salesforce devs will thank you too :D
Plus, there is a very high chance that future interviews for Salesforce dev gigs, they are NOT going to ask if you know React/Angular. Nice to have skills for sure, but they want to know how quickly you can get started working in their org. And chances are their apps are built with apex, Visualforce, or aura components. I'd rather spend a year building with aura components to make my new project transition easy, than spend a year building with react and have to pick up aura components all over again.
Get a couple certifications. Once I got 3-4 and a few years of experience, recruiters approach me on regular basis. FYI I have no college degree. Companies don't care. Certs and experience are worth more than any degree in the Salesforce space.
I've done some Salesforce work n the past, on a booking system that needed to read/write with their Salesforce instance. Their Salesforce dev spent a lot of times in our office during the build, and after a few drinks we were chatting about prospects as a Salesforce dev.
He pretty much echoed what you said - it's a different world to standard dev, and you can go quite deep into their ecosystem, but the work is always there, and a good Salesforce dev is worth his weight in gold so companies will bend over backwards to accommodate you - including paying your named price. It's depressing to write, but he probably earned 3-4x my salary for doing work that seemed pretty easy to him, and a quick glance on LinkedIn shows that he's still doing Salesforce work now.
From a cynical and maybe overly negative point of view, it felt like Salesforce developers are kind of like contracted mafia enforcers. As long as the devs play by Salesforce's rules and do a decent job (i.e. make Salesforce salesmen money), they throw them free, lucrative, repetitive, braindead, unfulfilling business. In our case, they literally couldn't screw up - we had to use them, and no amount of complaining to our Sales guy or trying to understand why the main engineer was such a kook was going to change our situation.
Seems like a really lucrative hustle to get into, as long as you don't mind dealing with absolute mediocrity.
Plenty of devs work with specific products as these products are used by many companies. I know lots of ERP developers that make very good money scripting customisations into ERP systems, it's a pain of a system but you're right at the heart of the business working on very high value contracts.
It sounds super limiting and frustrating ?
It also sounds like very non transferable skills you’re learning which might be difficult to use in other roles ?