Did I waste 4 years on a CS degree if I just want to do Web Dev?

I’m having a weird crisis lately. I spent four years getting a CS degree at UM thinking it was the real path into software. Algorithms, OS theory, compilers, data structures, all of it. I pushed through because everyone kept saying it would prepare me for anything and make me a better engineer long term.

But the deeper I get into web development, the more it feels like I trained for the wrong thing. Most of the actual work I want to do is building interfaces, working with APIs, handling state, understanding UX, and shipping features. Meanwhile I’m watching people who spent a few months in focused online schools get hired into the exact same frontend roles I’ve been aiming for.

Meanwhile I keep seeing people who took a focused bootcamp and they’re getting hired into the exact same frontend roles I’m aiming for. It almost feels unfair they learned precisely what the job requires while I spent years grinding through concepts that rarely show up in web dev interviews.

CS feels geared toward systems engineering, embedded work, data infra, and theory heavy roles not the stuff that shows up in most frontend job postings.

So now I’m stuck wondering if I took this long academic route for something I could’ve learned way faster. Or maybe the CS background does matter long term and I’m just not seeing the payoff yet.

If you did a traditional CS degree but ended up in frontend, how did you make sense of this?