No encouragement from me, unfortunately. Sorry. You’re right. It is hard. That’s the nature of the beast.
Your knowledge in creating websites might translate okay-ish to UI development, at least when it comes to layout/design/UX, provided you did a bit more than just set up WordPress sites for your customers.
I’d also argue that you went about the whole learning part a little wrong. You write
And you never will, because that is neither practical nor (I’d say) desirable. Every single game requires unique approaches depending on the sometimes very specific things it needs to accomplish. What is basic and what is advanced is a matter of perspective and things that look simple in the final product might have been a nightmare to code and vice versa.
This brings me to the only piece of advice that I can offer: Don’t try to learn how to create games, try to learn how to create systems. Because more than anything, video games are collections of systems that work together to create the finished thing. Learn how input is handled. Learn how animations work. Put both together and you have a character that walks and jumps and you can control. Learn how collision and overlaps work and you’re halfway through your first Mario clone.
4 years is plenty of time to become competent in even something as complex as Unreal Engine. If you still feel stuck after all these years, it’s high time to reevaluate your learning strategies. And remember that “coding” is not the same as “software engineering”. A formal CS education certainly helps, but the relevant knowledge can absolutely be acquired autodidactically.
This last one is my opinion, but I don’t see much value in those build-game-from-start-to-finish courses on Udemy and similar platforms. At most you should follow exactly one once to familiarize yourself with the tools you’ll be working with.