I'm not saying these are cool and impressive engineering projects. I've studied games engineering and also worked on small scale games, but there is an enormous difference between optimized graphics/game engine code and what you and I did.
I did 3d graphics too even some shaders for commercial projects (not games - enhanced vision devices for partially blind people). I did some basic (archais by now) 3d rendering techniques (BSP trees, portals, quadtrees) in my hobby games.
I don't think one is inherently harder or more cool than the other.
You can look at Dwarf Fortress for gameplay/quest/dialogs and Cyberpunk 2077 for graphic, and it would be as cool and hard as each other IMHO.
