Yeah, solo dev or indie is basically a gamble, either you make a game that people want to play 4 years down the line, or you make a game no one want to play and 4 years will go down the drain.

Yup, the way I see it, you have a few options:

1. work in game dev, have crazy deadlines, mediocre pay, and likely lose your job in a year or two; you'll grow to hate game dev due to all the stress
2. work in another industry and do game dev on your own time; if the side hustle is successful, go do that full-time and set your own pace; you'll get paid more, have more time off, and you can work on whatever game project you want
3. try to make solo game dev work (it probably won't), and then go back to 1 or 2

So on this list, 1 and 3 really don't look that appealing, so why do them? Just do 2 until something takes off, in which case the risk of 3 is already largely solved.

shittier games lead to harder times -> harder times create strong developers -> etc

trust the process

Not really... This isn't people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out