Note that I would never require leetcode during a job interview. However, a single LC question is a small-sized puzzle I can solve in a day (or a weekend). If I want to write a ray tracer, well... Good bye life for a week or two.
In other words, I have difficulties finding 50+ hours of large chunks of time to be unavailable to my family in my supposed off time. Leetcode I can do on a couch while my SO watches Games of Thrones.
Not necessarily! Maybe you just like puzzles? I don't.
>In other words, I have difficulties finding 50+ hours of large chunks of time to be unavailable to my family in my supposed off time.
If that's all that's stopping you from working on a ray-tracer, I think it's "just" a time-management problem. I work in increments ranging from 30 minutes to 2h. The trick is to schedule them, or at the very least, to have some kind of issue tracking system for yourself so that you can find an appropriately-sized chunk of work for those serendipitous 20 mins.
Lookup this book: Ray tracing in one weekend by Peter Shirley. You're in for a treat :-)
Meanwhile writing your own libraries, parsers, compilers, oh boi.
Additionally it gave me waaay more than LC stuff, especially when it comes to learning system modeling / proper OOP
None of that will help you pass an interview though!
I submit that you may be interviewing in the wrong places.
Obviously, it doesn't suffice to just point the decision-makers to your repos. You need to pick companies who would benefit from the expertise you acquired, and effectively pitch yourself to them.
It’ll land you a nice salary, to boot.