Sweet post! I even recognized a little bit of myself when reading about your burning out, frustration, etc but still continuing to write code. 😄
I usually make my navbars only from nav and a href links - I don't use lists in them. I make the width of the navbar 100%, the position: fixed. I don't give the navbar a height. I give the href links the class of nav-link and give them a padding, not a height and width. Thanks to the nav-link padding the height of the navbar should change too.
I encourage you to check out the Programming Community on Hive aswell as start posting your programming related posts there too! 😉