It is interesting to read this at a time when I am just beginning to "go public" with my work - I've been a hobbyist developer since before 2000, and barely released (read: finished) anything in that time. It was only in the last few years that I started trying to A) actually finish stuff and B) share it somewhere other than a single forum. Dang, am I one of those bandwagoners? :)
I feel there is a bit of contradiction to what you are expressing here. You said that you enjoyed making games when it was just an underground thing, and now the space is crowded. But you also said that art games never took off. So if they didn't take off, how is that space crowded? I guess what I mean is, don't you have a choice as to who you are competing or not competing with? Can't you create the art that you want to create and say F-off to the asset flippers? If you stay underground, the exploding indie market will simply ignore you. You can only be butting heads with other people if you are actually trying to make a name or a dollar in the same market as them. You also said "there are way too many people trying to do the same thing." So? What is forcing you to also try the same thing? Do something different. That option is always available to you. Sure, you might not make any money or fame, but as you said the golden age was when people were just making and sharing freeware. That still exists, there are still communities of people who just make and share art without it being one giant branding/advertising shitstorm. YOU just have to put in the effort to find them, the same way you had to back in '00. The Stream will not serve it to you. Google will not show it to you easily. You have to talk to people, and look for different avenues of information (non-SEO search engines, websites by real people [check out neocities!])
As for the mistreatment that happened to you, I'm really sorry to hear that. Keyboard warriors can become a major problem if they all group up... I think this kind of thing did happen in the earlier days but today there's a much greater volume of people online, as well as bots to ruin your day. I'll put my armor on now before I make it big...
I'm a musician too and it is always nice to take a break from development to just focus on composing for a bit. I've been tempted more than once to drop games and just make an album, but then I remember how I promised myself that I would really commit to dev life :P
I think - and hope - that the saturation of the market can be seen as an opening for new innovations to rise above the flotsam. And actually, old innovations too. Specifically in the realm of mobile games, there's just so much garbage going on with micro-purchases, pay to win, poor gameplay and superficial rewards. To me this is a window of opportunity to say "Hey, here's something different - an actual good game for a normal price, without all that noise." I've heard several devs say that you can't be successful on mobile without having ads or manipulative spend-more tactics. I hope to prove that wrong, it might be an uphill battle but I know there are consumers out there who wouldn't mind paying $5 for a breath of fresh air.
Just a random example because I experienced it first hand, the last mobile game I unfortunately played was Scrabble Go. What a CRAP experience, literally every five seconds there's a damn animation of a chest opening and pouring out gems or tokens or who knows what. Watch ads to gain powerups. Horribly designed interface that struggles on old phones. But does it have any cool additions to the game itself? Not really... just a standard board, and you get powerups that help you by picking a word for you or something. There are other alternatives but most of them are just pretty straightforward scrabble-likes.
I want to see a word game that actually iterates on the core idea. How about custom board layouts? Not just rearranging the doubles and triples, I mean totally different configurations. Islands. Mazes. Anything you want. HOW ABOUT A BOARD EDITOR. Now players are creating custom boards and puzzles to share. How about some interesting game modes such as 2v2. Takes very little programming but Go doesn't have it, so that's +1 for your product. How about customizable themes for the board and tiles. +1 for your product.
OK I'm really rambling here and need to eat lunch, lol. But I'm just trying to provide a counterpoint to this sentiment that I have seen from others as well, that we're all just going to drown in the sea of "successful" indie developers. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and the rough times you have been through, and it sounds like taking a step back to rekindle your inner artist is a really good idea. In general the way people use the internet is turning majorly into streaming, scrolling through a feed, basically just attaching an IV of information/entertainment to your arm without any critical thought or effort. However that is not the requirement, it is just a habit that the masses have fallen for. You have the option to connect to websites other than the usual FB/IG/Twitter circuit. You have the option to create art games in lesser known spaces, and ignore the pressure to turn yourself into a brand.
And WE, as developers and artists who don't want to support the current racket, have the option to create our own spaces and our own rules. After all the whole stream-everything paradigm pays next to nothing to the majority of creators. I'm opting out. I'd rather have to stay at my day job than to post vapid nonsense every two hours in order to keep my views up.