Dog neutrality is feeling impossible - please give me tips!

I have a 7 month old beauceron, he maturing into an amazing dog and we are making so much progress with training, heel work, settle training, down stays etc. but the biggest hurdle is always coming back to his arousal- particularly with dogs.

I can almost pretend his recall is good when I’m anywhere that doesn’t have dogs cause he’s responsive, attentive, he checks in with me, he doesn’t go beyond a certain radius away from me. He’ll recall. But the moment a dog comes into the picture- he completely switches off.

I feel like I’ve been doing things right but I’m hitting a point where progress is so minute that I’m wrecking my head wondering what I can do and what I’m doing wrong.

Right from when my boy was old enough to go outside, I avoided interactions with dogs, instead I focused socialisation on seeing dogs, mark and reward for looking away from them and at me. But it’s been an uphill climb from day one. I told myself, he’s just an excited pup, it’ll get better as he gets older as he learns he’s not interacting with on lead dogs. But if anything it’s getting worse. I’ve kept up the treats for disengaging, but as he got bigger it hit a point where even with the heel work and correct positioning I’d be teaching, he’d break the heel and damn near pull me flat onto my face to try and get to a dog. I never thought I’d start a dog on adversives this early but resorted to using a prong collar just to stop him yanking me over about a month ago. Even with this- I still reward for disengaging and he STILL pushes as much as he to get to other dogs.

I can’t let him off lead if other dogs are around, he has no recall at that point- frankly he has no nothing at that point cause my voice may as well be a breeze in the wind. He’s by no means aggressive towards dogs- he just wants to play but in my book- that just doesn’t matter. Other dogs may not want to play, small dogs might get hurt cause he’s a big dog- at the very least I wanna be able to call him back to me.

I’m hitting a point where I’m like ‘shit- is this gonna be it forever?’

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Or if anyone else had a dog that was particularly slow to start being neutral towards dogs I’d love to hear what worked for you