It looks most similar to a Rhodes piano-type electromechanical keyboard, where tuned metal elements are somehow actuated and then sonified with a guitar pickup.
Unlikely theres any FM which would require independently digitizing each of the resonators and just generally a lot of complexity that doesnt seem warranted.
The similarity in timbre isn't coincidental though -- FM is noted for its ability to emulate complex timbres like bells/metallic tones (such as electric pianos) that are challenging for more traditional subtractive synthesis architectures.
Sharing my experience if it helps.
I graduated in 2006 from Princeton CS, cum laude, with no job offers from any tech company.
This was even before the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, so I didn't really have an excuse.
I was lucky enough to be hired in the CS lab where I did my senior thesis work, as a research assistant, to continue some of the work I did for my senior thesis.
At the time it felt like a humbling experience to still be hanging around campus after already having graduated, but now I look back on those times fondly.
The work I did then was on an open source research project that ended up being a cornerstone of my future career, that people still bring up when I meet folks at conferences or other industry events.
Eventually I picked up an internship in San Francisco, and from there the job opportunities poured in.
I've had a rich and colorful career since, and am currently the CTO of a small-ish tech company in the music space.
Your best bet is to continue investing in work that is in public that you can point to for employers and friends.
Its easier said than done to frame a perceived failure as an opportunity, but thats the only constructive way to get through it; looking back, thats exactly been my experience.
This is a common misunderstanding of LLMs.
The major, qualitative difference is that LLMs represent their knowledge in a latent space that is composable and can be interpolated.
For a significant class of programming problems this is industry changing.
E.g. "solve problem X for which there is copious training data, subject to constraints Y for which there is also copious training data" can actually solve a lot of engineering problems for combinations of X and Y that never previously existed, and instead would take many hours of assembling code from a patchwork of tutorials and StackOverflow posts.
This leaves the unknown issues that require deeper reasoning to established software engineers, but so much of the technology industry is using well known stacks to implement CRUD and moving bytes from A to B for different business needs.
This is what LLMs basically turbocharge.
AI flags anything that could be suspicious, human moderator reviews the exact circumstances of anything flagged.
Google is one of the largest tech companies on the planet, if anyone can solve "impossible" problems its them.
But not if they are lacking internal impetus to change anything.
Yeah the OP specifically called out open-ness as being a dealbreaker for the Javelin Stamp. I never used Basic Stamp, but from what I can figure, it didn't have ADCs by default, which is a huge deal. Even now people who are slapping an Arduino on top of Raspberry Pi because its the simplest way to get a few ADCs for sensor input. Cost also seems to have been an issue, and a big RS-232 port probably gave the impression of obsolescence.
Being readily available for Mac doesn't hurt for the design/art crowd either- Wikipedia suggests that Basic Stamp didnt have first-party Mac support? Also looking visually similar to Processing (both the IDE and the code style) eases the switchover for people who are new to coding. Ive heard Arduino described as "Processing for Hardware" which is a bit of a stretch in a technical sense, but perhaps exactly correct in a spiritual sense.
Embedded systems engineers are very intentionally not the audience for Arduino. With Arduino you can go from zero EE/FW experience to blinky LEDs in an evening. This is a powerful tool for opening up hardware hacking to young people, artists, designers, and other non-technical professions. Very few of these people are going to read through a datasheet or figure out the difference between DDRB and PORTB.
The similarity in timbre isn't coincidental though -- FM is noted for its ability to emulate complex timbres like bells/metallic tones (such as electric pianos) that are challenging for more traditional subtractive synthesis architectures.