My experience has been pretty different - though I guess games jams can have very different local flavours depending on where you participate. I found the people who cared enormously about games as games in seemingly trivially-themed game-jam communities, and the bigger/professional/more serious organisations can end up being swamped by professionalism/business considerations (But not always). Thats kinda how I got started, more than 10 years ago. Building up a network of like-minded/interesting/whatever friends I guess was for me critical in my artistic (and professional) development. And when the communities are disrupted, as in which covid, my work gets thrown into confusion. But different people find different environments conductive to making games (of different types), I know... .