I can relate to your point of view, which is why I don't work for "the tech industry", but instead have my own SaaS. This lets me stay close to tech (I love programming in Clojure and ClojureScript!), do what I enjoy, and not have my soul sucked out by evilness and stupidity of today's adtech world.
I have a product which solves a real problem and I'm getting paid by customers who appreciate that their workflow is somewhat easier with my tool. No tricks there.
So, you do have a choice. I'm not saying it's easy or quick, but the choice is there.
How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.
If I were to start again, I would look outside of my tech bubble. Go see a local workshop, baker, restaurant. Look into niche industries. There are plenty of inefficiencies and unsolved problems there. I think the best ones are where you deal with physical things (e.g. not just advertising or getting customers).
There are plenty of unsolved problems.
An alternative is to look for a problem that has been "solved", but not in a certain niche. For example, inventory control and tracking production seems to be a "solved" problem, but it turned out it wasn't a "solved" problem for small/medium-scale electronics manufacturing, which is the niche I'm in.
Yeah in honestly shocked at how many niche problems. I encounter that have ready solutions. If I ever find a truly unsolved problem, in likely to assume that its just too hard to properly solve at the time.
Why do you think you need to find a truly unsolved problem? If all you want is a profitable, sustainable business, look at what companies are already paying for, and build a product that solves one of those problems. It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of an existing product. You can differentiate by price or combination of features. Or you can target a different niche. Competition is a signal that there's money to be made in the market.
It won't be easy, and you will have to learn sales & marketing. But it is doable. If there are X companies in the market, there's likely a place for another one (as long as this isn't a winner-takes-all type of market).
Just find a pain point. One of my products sells just because people really don't like certain aspects of my biggest competitor. So I capitalize on that and make migration easy.
So solve it for the 101st time, but better. Everything is broken and nothing works. So, build something that isn't broken and does work.
I just found out yesterday that AWS Amplify doesn't have a manual deploy button. It's only job is to build and deploy an app and there is nowhere on Amplify itself where you can press a button and kick off a build! Junk like this is everywhere now. It's a golden opportunity for people who know what they're doing.
I have a product which solves a real problem and I'm getting paid by customers who appreciate that their workflow is somewhat easier with my tool. No tricks there.
So, you do have a choice. I'm not saying it's easy or quick, but the choice is there.