I felt similar last year. I was trying to do them in Zig and Rust, and it felt like most of the challenge was just writing custom data parsers for poorly formatted data which felt too much like my day job.
I think it helps to do it in a language you're not familiar with, or with some artificial limitation on how to solve it (no third party libraries for instance).
It takes more time, but felt less like a grind for me.
Last year I have used Python without using any imports and, whenever I felt like it, tried to golf it as much as I could. Turned out easier than I expected, even without any libraries Python is pretty powerful for this kind of tasks: https://gitlab.com/dos1/AoC21
There were only like two or three days that felt frustrating, but mostly because of the problem being poorly specified.
I'm using a language with easier data parsing this year and so far I'm having a much better time (I'm also more time poor and these exercises fit in pretty nicely to a bit of after dinner free time).
Fwiw there’s a few recurring formats, the old hands have a bunch of helpers for that and other things. Sometimes there’s something completely bespoke but the most commons are space-separated lines of things, usually ints, commonly fixed-size.
