It's also soul crushing to know I now have to compete with stay at home moms and liberal arts dropouts who went to bootcamps for positions...
I've thought about doing my own startup I just strongly don't believe I have the technical chops to deliver, but maybe I should take a swing to save my career chances and avoid wasting 4+ years of my life getting a CS degree?
You're right - ideally if you can create a profitable startup there's no need to knock down doors for a job. That's the dream I'm chasing and I'm sure a lot of others are too.
Exactly with both you and the parent. This path saves you from spending your valuable time, skills and energy on leetcode/hackerrank puzzles just for a job and there's no need to do this or knock down doors for one if your startup is profitable.
I would rather create a startup with a solid business-model which requires limited funding that later pays itself (I know it is easier said than done) than to subject myself to frivolous whiteboard programming tasks that are never used in practice. But note that raising too much capital, trades in more control to VCs to decide the fate of your startup.
I find it worth the risk to carry on with working on a startup to bypass the interview games. So please keep going with your startup plans.
To be frank, burning time doing leetcode makes me hate coding because I don't find it interesting or a decent use of time (outside of building up a stupid toy skill to pass interviews).
The problem here is that the barrier to becoming a 'developer' these days is being lowered every week due to the millions of other 'developers' attending bootcamps or graduating from university just like yourself. CS is still a lucrative career option, its just that hiring managers can't deal with the same abundance of devs to choose from and will select those from their internal professional network or recommended by their own colleagues. This applies to everyone entering the field.
It's even harder for juniors and more difficult if you have little to no experience, thus resorting into doing the coding interview lottery (Which is deliberately rigged to waste your time). I don't see why someone like you with open-source contributions and with some experience still end up in this interviewing game. Perhaps with the background you have, you could create your own startup with some former colleagues to join, or obtain multiple referrals from current employees before applying. Both have varying degrees of risk and possibly have a 50:50 chance of going either way.
But if I saw a junior developer that created a profitable startup or side-project with several employees, it tells me that they're clever enough to apply their skills into practice, very quick to learn and they get lots of experience for free. That is a standout junior which I would bet on to easily train to become senior.