You're doing fine. I built a couple social media type sites in raw PHP over 15 years ago. They never went anywhere but they did help get my foot in the door at a couple dev shops back in the day.
Years later I rewrote them in codeigniter. So that's about all the advice I can give because I'm certain that my sites had security holes in them too.
Reading your experience took me down memory lane. Thanks for the throwback.
They've probably realized that American corporations which are ran by the Epstein class get to sift through all the data