Unpopular opinion but I preferred Mafia 3 over 2. I don’t think any of them are great games, just solid ones.

Mafia 2’s story is good, but the game started to feel pretty repetitive for me quickly. “Get in car, drive somewhere listening to a conversation to move the story forward, shoot some people, repeat until game is over.”

Mafia 3 also feels repetitive, and can definitely start to feel grindy. But I think the main missions are better designed than 2, and the combat overall also feels better and more fun. So it’s a trade off: it’s an open world game so it’s got more filler to make it longer, but when it’s good it’s better than its predecessor (IMHO).

Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

What you’re describing sounds like burnout to me. Stepping away from coding could be a good step in recovering. New offer certainly sounds worth trying, I hope it goes well.

Restic supports symlinks: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/040_backup.html#backing-up-special-items-and-metadata.