Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.

Moved to the US, math was easier and it kinda fell off. Was back to Ukraine for some time, but it was never the same afterwards, and now I have the same math anxiety many other people do.

Most of our reality is composed of humans doing things, and if you dig deep enough into why humans are doing various bad things, you'll find a lot of confused, closed up people chasing odd status markers because they need it to survive against other parties chasing odd status markers. It's an error that endlessly feeds itself, and the only escape is to cancel it somewhere - do something else.

The point is kind of moot when the people you are supposedly protecting against are of your own kind.

Connections and the ability to play politics seem to be much more important for getting to the top. Current systems, managers, etc., are just not setup to evaluate skill from what I've seen, you have to sell yourself, which means "ability to sell yourself" is how the system is stratified, and that's not merit.

So when you say "the best", often what you get is "best at selling self", which is not actually the best.

*ample use of scare quotes because I found "different developers work well in different situations or best with certain people" to be more true than "there's this 'best' developer let's clone them".

As a basic example, in a lot of places you get very little advance warning that you're going to interview someone.

Test problems or assignments are often not tested or even looked at by existing employees, so often you don't even know that your current team would do well on them.

Sometimes interviews happen without any intention at all to hire the candidate (wtf).

I don't think most people are against doing what they are good at (or even, what they like), it's just that discoverability is poor and in a lot of cases the most important thing ends up being a certain brand of social or political skill, and not the other secondary skill you might posses. For people to play to their strengths, we need a society that can detect and nurture those strengths, and I don't think we have that right now.

There are wonderful games being made and I even found new titles to call my favorites as the years go by. I do not at all believe games are getting worse.

That being said, there are a lot more games now and there's less hard curation, and some genres have shifted (RTS and classic style MMORPGs are both dormant atm).

Don't assume something is easy or straightforward for everyone because it was for you.

Can you give some examples? Most things I'm aware of that could be classified as puzzles require, at the very least, enormous time investment, if not specialization, and there's often lots of drudgery along the way.

For instance, lots of peoples' mental states improve when they are able to not live with their parents, for various reasons. That requires money.