Yet another sad testament of what the Indie Hacker space has turned into. Just Indie Hackers selling to Indie Hackers. A closed system built on a mountain of false hope.
I feel your pain. I was stick in the same boat as you a couple of years back. It’s hard as CRUD really is the bread and butter of the industry. I did two things..
1. Took a few weeks of holiday and didn’t TOUCH a computer during that time, did a hard reset.
2. Longer term, I looked into stuff I had never programmed (during my spare time) to rekindle my love for it. Stuff that was (objectively) useless for my career but that I did anyway for the sheer love of it. In my case it was messing around with 3d games libraries and building a basic gaming server.
Turn down a job for any reason you want - you have nothing to feel bad / guilty about. But honestly, don't go into detail / give that reason. It sounds unreasonable, and could hurt your reputation (people tawk).
If you have a long enough career is Software Dev, you will almost certainly at some point end of using a software product you personally don't like. Learning to compromise / pick your battles is a career skill like any other.
Apologies if this sounds overly critical, but as a hiring manager, I would consider it a bullet dodged. Drawing hard lines in the sand over small things like this would be a red flag for me.
If anybody is interested, there was a phenomenal documentary made a few years back, about the early clinical trials of CAR-T therapy for Leukaemia students.
I remember people saying WEB 2.0 / AJAX was bullshit too. It's easy to lampoon the buzzwords / early failures of a new paradigm. People will be tinkering to learn new ways to working. Personally I believe Web3 has a huge future.