Programming

I think the general path to enlightenment looks like this (in order of experience):

1. Learn about patterns and try to apply all of them all the time
2. Don't use any patterns ever, and just go with a "lightweight architecture"
3. Realize that both extremes are wrong, and focus on finding appropriate middle ground in each situation using your past experiences (aka, be an engineer rather than a code monkey)

Eventually, you'll end up "rediscovering" some parts of SOLID on your own, applying them appropriately, and not even realize it.

Generally, the larger the code base and/or team (which are usually correlated), the more that strict patterns and "best practices" can have a positive impact. Sometimes you need them because those patterns help wrangle complexity, other times it's because they help limit the amount of damage incompetent teammates can do.

But regardless, I want to point something out:

the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.

This attitude is a problem. It's an attitude of ignorance, and it's an easy hole to fall into, but difficult to get out of. Nobody is "circlejerking OOP". You're making up a strawman to disregard something you failed at (eg successful application of SOLID principles). Instead, perform some introspection and try to analyze why you didn't like it without emotional language. Imagine you're writing a postmortem for an audience of colleagues.

I'm not saying to use SOLID principles, but drop that attitude. You don't want to end up like those annoying guys who discovered their first native programming language, followed a Vulkan tutorial, and now act like they're on the forefront of human endeavor because they imported a GLTF model into their "game engine" using assimp...

A better attitude will make you a better engineer in the long run :)