FWIW: i heard of a bunch of qualified engineers who ended up as full-time VTubers, YouTubers or pop-culture entertainers of all things.

Now i am not suggesting you should try whoring yourself on the Internet for the lulz or anything, the point is that in this day and age there’s probably some bizarre direction you haven’t even considered yet.

What did you switch to?

Unless you want to mess around with something like this, your current best option is probably to manually upscale things yourself using something like waifu2x and then repack everything into your own .CBZ archives.