As a former candidate now turned software engineer and interviewer, I seriously like your story and it does reflect the sad state of the tech industry's hiring process. When I need to find candidates, I usually ignore degrees or hello world based projects, but I ask for either original work or open-source contributions or features added into another project. As with your own project, I don't need to throw a test at you if you dealing with a project with advanced data structures like CRDTs, which I'm sure you already know to apply them well.

Unfortunately, this industry tends to believe that implementing something like a R*-Tree or a Van-Embe-Boas Tree in less than 10 mins is an indicator of being qualified for a CRUD application-level job. If I were hiring right now, I would preferably take on more candidates that have open-source contributions over leetcoders because with open-source, you can obviously code, use version control, do code reviews and as a bonus, you can show your work at a meetup / conference. Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility doesn't allow you to showcase your optimal solutions and even if you attempt to, you risk breaching their plagiarism rules. So those platforms don't allow you to showcase those soft skills.

Your experience alone tells me you are already qualified for senior roles that these companies are 'struggling' to fill.