It depends, it is true if you always get the dirty works, like coding without much thinking, but if there are some innovation ideas come to your mind from time to time, life will be much easier, and your promotion will become easier.
Got promotion is not easy here, you need to be expertise in some technical areas, and pass promotion interview, there will be many questions from many experts during that interview, you won't be considered as qualified until every answer from you satisfies them, that is why many young engineers choose to leave in one or two years, there are not much chances for them, and even you are true expert, you will get frustrated.
but life is not that hard than you think, I have a Tencent's game engineer friend, he is a tennis fun, what I get from him is they have tennis activity every day, and he can go off work at about 6PM to play tennis 2-3 days every week.
and I heard some guys from google, they need the same long hours work and pretty stressful, just they don't need to stay at the same work place that long, they have the working place flexibility.
Come to Shenzhen, you will see, salaries like Tencent, alibaba, can offer are much higher than SV, in the conditions of you should be expertise in some technical area, and good background, like google, facebook, etc working experience.
what they offer can be at least double companies, like google, facebook, can offer in the same technical level.
NZ is very attractive place, I had long planed to move into there, and one of my ex-colleague made it, he found one job in Wellington.
but my work is pretty low-level, high performance and chip level stuff, mostly with Linux kernel driver, and network, I encounter the same issue with you, jobs related there are raw.
I plan to start a startup there if there are proper chances one day.
the most important thing for me is investigate that market, what may be the real requirement there.
There is alternative option beside VPN, which is shadowSocket, you can search keyword SSR, it works very well, in order to use it, you need to rent a VPS (about $10 per year), which is used to deploy SSR service. it is more secure than VPN I think.
emacs org-mode is very useful, but most of the time, I prefer picture, which is easy to understand and review, there are some mind map tool, like mindmanager, and xmind, you can have a try
LaTex + Tikz is very helpful for paper work, and viso is very useful tool to draw professional diagrams, and mindmanager and xmind are mind map tool, they can be used to draw some beautiful mind diagrams.