I'd give Löve2D or Godot a go

Yes, and use C#. Just keep at it for a while. At least a month. If you don't like it you can change platforms, languages.

With Unity you need to learn a lot about how Unity does things. All the tutorials will tech you how to assemble components and wire them up using the editor. You'll build a scene of game objects with c# scripts attached to them. It can be very fast to get a simple game working.

I imagine it's a little like learning Photoshop or Flash where you attach scripts to different parts of your image.

I use Unity all day for my day job, but I don't use it for my side projects. It's big, slow, and clunky. It's not really all that fun.

For my side projects I prefer a code only solution and have played around with Raylib, Love2d, Pixi.js, and Three.js depending if I want 2d/3d or browser/ standalone.

Try Raylib. It doesn't sound like you'll need much more than progressively using more advanced libraries, and Raylib is an excellent beginner graphics library. You'll want C or C++ even though it has bindings for a lot of languages, but with C/C++ you can then go to the more lower level libs.

I wouldn't touch Unity after their recent behavior. Try out Godot. It's FOSS, there are forks supporting different languages and your projects won't be beholden to the whims of a single company trying to squeeze money from you.

If you want to try something more low level, I'd suggest SDL3, with whatever language you like.