I lost faith in the industry, burned out, but the cult of the tool saved me

Things never got so bad for me that I «lost faith in the industry», but I definitely had the same reaction to F# as you did.

It just makes programming so much more fun — all the tedium is gone, it feels like every character you write is actually important.

Why we fill the minds of programmers in the making with enterprisey rituals instead of fundamental wisdom eludes me. What you have rediscovered that night is «programming by wishful thinking» as introduced in SICP 40 years ago. The main role F# played was to break you out of all the bad habits you had in C# (and perhaps Java) and TypeScript. All of which are nice fine languages, but their beauty is usually obscured by cults of superfluous non-sense.