Learning CICD and the concepts behind it takes less than a week. Once it is in place, pretty much all your projects should follow the same patterns so I don't know why you are complaining about it wasting your time.
Learning security code best practices should be done continuously and applied to each project you work on, it's part of the job. Software development doesn't just encompass the actual coding...security best practices also applies to CICD, data access, cloud architecture, mesh, containers, etc.
Good luck coding your own frameworks like service meshes, orchestration framework, cloud framework, secure data infra like Hashicorp, etc.
Sounds like being a programmer for you is just front-end javascript old school stuff or simple command line scripts.