You’re incredibly talented, Taylor. Their loss, sincerely. If they didn’t hire you, know that it wasn’t the right fit and you shouldn’t be there. Your talents are needed elsewhere.
I don’t love spending time on LinkedIn but I do love that you know what you’re going to get when you go there. There’s not some fake underlaying goal like “keeping people connected.” You’re there to promote yourself and your company, find a job, or hire a person. If you’re not doing any of those things you can just not go there and you won’t miss a thing. If you need a job after 2 years, get back in there, play the game, then log off when you’re done. IMHO it’s about as honest as a large online social network can get.
I wrote a an HTML template for a friend that looked like the Drudge Report (conservative news aggregator that looks a certain way). I posted it online for free and got a number of folks asking for a WordPress version. I coded one up and started selling it online as WP-Drudge. It sold quite well for many years and generated a solid portion of my freelance income making modifications for random sites. I ended up working for Alan Colmes (RIP), the sole liberal on Fox News (conservative news network) and a delightful individual. I built a few more products and eventually sold the whole business several years back. To this day I still get freelance inquiries!