This leetcode interview stuff is not healthy for the industry and not healthy for engineers personally. What I am reading here is that you have had one job that didn't work out. Leetcode honestly means nothing to me.
Here's an anecdote from myself. I have been a software engineer for 15+ years. I was a computer science major like you in college. My first job out of college was at Intel where I also only lasted less than 2 years. While I didn't get fired for performance issues, my first annual performance review was also a performance improvement plan and I was the bottom of the pack (i.e. did not get a raise). I had issues coming from years of education-focused mindsets that I thought passing exams was all it's about, and I often did not "get" what it means to be productive in a company as an employee. It took me time over the years to "get it". After Intel I worked for a friend's web dev shop for a year. Then I finally landed at a startup (which became a unicorn later), which was 2008, and the rest was history -- I was promoted several levels in said startup, and later cofounded my own funded startup (which didn't work out at the end), and I went on to work as a staff engineer at my next two companies. And finally, I probably wouldn't be able to solve any leetcode problems (maybe above the easy ones).
It's your personal decision to stay or quit programming, but if you had any willingness to stay at all, I would encourage you to simply ignore this leetcode stuff and interview at companies that don't do leetcode whiteboard interviews and try to work as a software engineer at a new company, so you have a sample size of more than 1 company in your work experience. And when you do so, try at it from a standpoint of understanding the business, understanding what makes an impact and drives the business forward, and do those things. At the core level, that's the most important thing about working as a software engineer.
Leetcode and the “grind fake problems as interview prep” mentality is the absolute worst thing that has happened to the software industry in the 30 years I’ve been in it. If it disappeared suddenly, we’d all be better off.
I agree that we need a better way to evaluate people that meets the purported goals of being fair and eliminating the chance for bias.
I joined a FAANG at 44 and had to do the Leetcode evaluation. TBH, it wasn't so much a grind as a bit of re-learning how to ride a bicycle. I have the "benefit" of being old enough that solving those kinds of low-level problems was work I actually did in my younger days before all of these fancy libraries existed. I spent about 10 hours over the course of a couple weeks just "refreshing" myself on ways to identify the brute force vs. clever solutions to some basic CS problems of array manipulation and graph traversal.
It was pretty low effort, but it was the side show to my decades of experience. For younger folks with only a couple years experience, I can see how it becomes the "everything" because it's the majority of their evaluation.
Here's an anecdote from myself. I have been a software engineer for 15+ years. I was a computer science major like you in college. My first job out of college was at Intel where I also only lasted less than 2 years. While I didn't get fired for performance issues, my first annual performance review was also a performance improvement plan and I was the bottom of the pack (i.e. did not get a raise). I had issues coming from years of education-focused mindsets that I thought passing exams was all it's about, and I often did not "get" what it means to be productive in a company as an employee. It took me time over the years to "get it". After Intel I worked for a friend's web dev shop for a year. Then I finally landed at a startup (which became a unicorn later), which was 2008, and the rest was history -- I was promoted several levels in said startup, and later cofounded my own funded startup (which didn't work out at the end), and I went on to work as a staff engineer at my next two companies. And finally, I probably wouldn't be able to solve any leetcode problems (maybe above the easy ones).
It's your personal decision to stay or quit programming, but if you had any willingness to stay at all, I would encourage you to simply ignore this leetcode stuff and interview at companies that don't do leetcode whiteboard interviews and try to work as a software engineer at a new company, so you have a sample size of more than 1 company in your work experience. And when you do so, try at it from a standpoint of understanding the business, understanding what makes an impact and drives the business forward, and do those things. At the core level, that's the most important thing about working as a software engineer.