It's not your fault, but it sounds like you and probably a lot of other people were misled about what having a degree actually does.
The most important thing someone looks at when you apply for a job is that you are interested in the thing and capable of doing it. The degree doesn't really do that but the personal projects do. The degree might be a nice to have on top and helps to convince some people, but you always end up working with people without one anyway.
It's weird because everywhere I've ever worked routinely hires people who don't even know how to make a commit, or anything at all really.
For some reason even those people are somehow jumping ahead of competent people like you in the queue. It's also annoying for us because we have to deal with the bad ones that HR delivers.