Praise God, brother! This story is awesome and heartwarming. I, too, had a similar experience in my developer career journey. In Summer of 2022, I got hired to my first developer role as a UI/UX Developer after a month of being laid off from a previous tech role (non-developer based); but just like you, time started to become non-existent, lots of fires to be put out with various clients. The organization was definitely losing touch with their client engagements. 2 devs left in late 2022. Then come February 2023, my UI/UX Lead resigns, so I started to look for other opportunities and in March 2023, I was let go.

Just like you I applied to many jobs (via LinkedIn & Indeed), modified my resume until I got to the best and most effective version of it, got interviews, plenty of rejections, technical assessments, and then eventually landed an interview with a company that very much so interviewed me the same way your current company did.

I am truly blessed and grateful to God for this journey and what He taught me during this season. I would say, "I am the happiest developer in the world" right now. The schedule is very flexible, I work from home, my manager is amazing, everyone at VBA (specifically in the App team) are wonderful and amazing engineers. It is also my first six-figure role. I had goals to obtain a role at 6-figures within a 5yr plan but I received it not even 2yrs into my developer career. It is no coincidence. All in the Lord's timing and with great purpose!