am I missing something about gamedev?

I've been making a game I dreamed of since 2023 for over half a year now, and I'm still nowhere near finishing a prototype I could show to people. it hurts so much to make games as a non-programmer (meaning I don't have any technical knowledge and implement stuff in the worst way possible), I spent weeks on fixing each one of the edge cases caused by a mechanic I've added in a day, I already forgot what the vision for the game even was - is it supposed to be like this? I thought once you code a feature and do some trouble shooting you're done and it should work as expected, yet I still find problems in the very core of the game I simply cannot ignore. it's honestly killing both my passion for the craft and my soul. last time I spent a year making a 40 minute game, and I can only imagine in fear what would it take to actually make a project of such big scope as mine good.

the point is, I think I just don't understand something crucial about how you are supposed to make a game. do you just add stuff and it just works? or do you actually spent 90% of the time fixing what's already in there? how do I improve?