Presumably then you are also teaching your kids to not become hair dressers, beauticians, child minders, social workers, care workers, psychologists or teachers? Because those fields are also "just not normal" by your standards.
Pick one area to specialise in, re-write your CV to emphasise all the things you did related to the specialisation. You can even change previous job titles to match your new field of expertise.
This is the way any field goes when the technology advances. In the 1960s most people working on computers then were effectively electronic engineers, computer scientists and software developers all at the same time. Now in 2020, you will be hard pressed to find a software company that cares about your knowledge of ohm's law and similarly you won't find an embedded electronics company that cares about your experience with state management in React.
What about becoming a penetration tester? Its a much easier to go from developer to pen tester than from developer to security researcher, though thats not to say its easy either. Plus working as a pen tester its highly likely you will have colleagues who are security researchers, you can talk to and learn from them. There aren't generally "junior security researcher" roles available, you'll have to start somewhere and pen testing is a good foot in the door, it also involves breaking things so that might satisfy your itch too.
> This made me feel bad because it implied an assumption of thoughtlessness on my part and did little to help me out.
You need to man up. How was your colleague supposed to know that you had already attempted that if there was no evidence of it and you didnt mention it? I can see absolutely nothing wrong with what the reviewer did in your example. The only thing wrong it seems is your attitude.
> I don't know what about my personality inspires this behavior. These comments seem to be directed more at me than at other people.
Is it possible that you just don't produce the quality of work that the rest of the team would like you do produce? What do you expect the others to do? Not point things out in your PR reviews because they dont want to hurt your feelings? This isn't kindergarten.
> Can I find a better situation as a programmer or should I leave tech?
If you left tech where would you work instead? Do you think that lawyers don't point out faults in each others work? Doctors face law suits all the time if they make mistakes. Or maybe you want to leave the professional world all together and take up a trade like brick-laying. Do you think that a building site manager won't say something if your brick-laying is sub-standard? It sounds like the issue lies squarely with you here.
In my experience, the amount of time it takes to "do it right" with electron completely negates the whole "its just simple web technologies you already know" selling point.
Yes VSCode has decent performance, but watch some of their tech talks about what they have to do in order to reach that level of performance - its insane. The amount of time, effort and increased complexity that is required to make an electron app get close to native performance makes it not at all worth it. And despite all those efforts, VSCode STILL isnt as fast as Sublime.
Electron is like a welder trying to build a house out of metal - sure he probably CAN make it work, eventually, but he really should have just learnt brick-laying and done it the proper way. Even though he managed to build a house without learning anything new, it would've been quicker and better if he had just sucked it up and learnt how to lay bricks rather than trying to build a house out using a far inferior material. (I'm sure there is a better analogy out there but you get my point).