Being able to do challenging projects is a cold comfort when by far the most challenging project I’ve ever faced was trying to build something people would pay.
Being a good programmer helps though, technical challenging things tend to have much smaller and worse competition.
Like, you probably wont make a lot of money making another 2d platformer no matter how well you code, they are so easy to make that there are millions of them out there already. However if you make a performant and bug free factorio or minecraft clone you will at least get a few thousand people try it and from there it would grow if it is fun.
You're being downvoted despite being a realist, having integrity, and putting things in perspective.
But I can tell you there is no shortage of oversellers in the programming community.
A programmer who's really a sleazy salesman at heart would jump at figuring out a fizbuzz solution on their own for the first time in their life, and would proceed to mark it as the biggest achievement in the history of mankind, make a webservice out of it, shout at the top of their lungs on social media, and would start knocking on VC doors. (hint hint: many of them actually get away with something not too different).
I face the same problem, I think that programmers can be skilled in a lot of different tasks, but for large projects, our two hands and our brain are not enough, no matter how smart you are, you need co-founders, loneliness leads you to procrastinate eternally.
I completely agree. Writing apps for the app store is the perfect example. I started out coding well coded apps that didn't make money, and as time has progressed my apps have lower code quality but I make more money. I focus less on code quality now and think more about marketing and appeal.
In addition my concern with this is that it’s totally ok in my opinion to not do any of these and I doubt for most people doing these projects will make you better at your job (unless you happen to be doing this as your next project), so if you want to tune out in your spare time that’s ok too.