What do you do then?

There are tons and tons of areas in software that aren't web (or mobile, which is usually just web with another toolkit).

Games, Desktop apps, Industrial, embedded, ...

Personally I do desktop applications and love it.

Yeah I did desktop apps for a while (in .NET), but they can be just as repetitive and non-inventive. In my case they were mostly shelf-stacking / syncing apps for internet shops.

I simply don't believe that a domain (understood broadly, ie. desktop/mobile/web) in and of itself dictates whether projects are original and interesting.

Not until you work on something really specialized, like AI etc.

Yeah, so long as a desktop app could have been a browser app, it tends to have the same problems as a browser app (i.e it's just CRUD).

They are usually only interesting if they are desktop apps because they have to, like image editors, games, CAD.

My test for interesting work is the fraction of lines of code that relates to processing data and not just input/presentation/persistence/validation.