Salesforce dev has evolved heavily in the last 10 years. Nowadays, depending on the project, you can be working on integrations most of the time, complex automations, and/or front end development through the Lightning Web Components framework. Last project I did a fair amount of work integrating Salesforce with AWS, using Lambda to talk to other services. It was pretty fun!
CTO here, but I built the first bits of our SF setup. It’s essentially a fully cloud hosted rapid development environment that gives you a database and ways to visualise and do crud on this. For line of business stuff this can be really powerful. As a dev, it’s mostly around gluing the bits between and around the key crud actions and doing meta presentation and interface stuff.
It's usually a soupy mix of salesforce API integration work and wading through tons and tons of programmery-looking user interfaces.
It's not hard, but it requires an incredible amount of overhead to first understand various different salesforce specific concepts and then understand the various different broken workflows your company has adopted using those concepts.