You should have loved electrical engineering, but you should also have loved software engineering. It's just that the software side of your education leap-frogged straight over the fundamentals and into hacking on cutting-edge completed systems at the very beginning, which suited your desired learning style much better.

There are plenty of "applied" electronics technician or electrician's apprenticeship programs that are more like your software education. Take an induction motor, a variable frequency drive, a few sensors, and a programmable logic controller, and hook them together according to the manufacturer's instructions, and you can be off to the races operating a pump or a conveyor on day 1. But will you understand how the insulated gate bipolar transistors and filters in that variable frequency drive turn the rectified high-voltage DC bus into three-phase AC that generates a rotating magnetic field and induces a current in the motor armature? No, you don't need to know any of that to make the pump work.

You wrote:

> I couldn’t imagine ... a toy CPU implemented in SystemVerilog being ... useful

No, it's really not, but your work on real CPUs depends on registers and combinatorial logic and ALUs and MMUs. End users can typically just download Python and treat everything behind the screen as a black box, but if you really want to call what you're doing "engineering" or a "science", then developing an understanding for what happens behind the curtains is incredibly useful. If you've implemented a toy 8-bit CPU with load, store, compare, jump, and a few basic math instructions, you can write some assembly or a toy interpreter for it and you will have an understanding of how real CPUs work that can enable you to write better code later. Add some interrupts to that CPU and build a multitasking operating system, and you'll understand parallelism better.

All of modern technology is a pyramid. At the point of that pyramid is just a single doped semiconductor with a P-N junction. We build that junction into transistors, and transistors into gates, and gates into CPUs, and on those CPUs we execute assembly, and we write low-level languages that compile into assembly, and build operating systems and syscalls with those low-level languages, and access those systems with high-level languages, and connect those computers together with networks, and write applications that operate on those networks, and at the broad base of the pyramid there are billions of people using those applications.

In 2025, no one human brain comprehends the full stack anymore, we all become our own individual bricks in a particular layer. But to do the best work at any point in the pyramid, you ought to know a bit of how it works above and below you!