I've seen this again and again: good, honest people trying to do their best in their day to day... but unavoidably, whenever we reach a larger scale scenario, everything breaks. And it's not technology. It's people. You can live happy with a few friends, or many friends, as long as you stay in your small world. Even working on complicated things. But when you start trying to scale up and translate the magic to the big world, it becomes too much, because it's impossible. It's so messy and complex and there are so many parts out of your control, that you can't attempt to care and not end up hurt, to do things right, because no one has such power in a world this complex. The business landscape around technology is terrible... but that's just like any other large-scale landscape. Tech might scale well. What never scales nicely is adding more and more people to ambitious projects. We don't scale well.

So... Do not attempt to align your ambitions with money or the big world. Try to find a job where you can directly see the benefits of your work, and where you only need to think about "the people physically in front of you". Your curiosity is still there, it's only overshadowed by all the other problems you had to face. But they are separate things. It might take a while to see them separately again, but it's possible. You just need to identify this and stop pushing yourself in the directions where they overlap.