Sadly, Godot is not used much in the industry yet. It's mostly indie and solo developers using it. I think the only case of a well know studio using Godot was SEGA on Sonic Colors Ultimate on Switch/PS4/PC. It was actually a great game, some people complained about bugs but it seemed okay to me. Other than that, it's all indie games. I regularly get contacted to do freelance work, but I always turn people down cause I'm too busy right now.
But there is interest in using Godot, though mostly from unknown players. None of the big studios use it as far as I know. But I have seen job listings, I know there are companies doing research and/or building forks of Godot for internal stuff. For example, Tesla is doing this. Some other companies are in the R&D stages, but no serious projects. But Godot is appealing because the source is free, so you could download and have a nice base to start and develop custom stuff without paying a lot of money.
I don't know the current rates, but to get a custom source license for Unity or Unreal is in the high 6-figures. It might depend on who you are and the specific deal terms, but you could easily be talking about $250,000 and up. At one point Unreal 3 I think was a million dollars, but they brought the price down a bunch after UE4 went sort of kind of open source. So if you are a smaller company and need custom engine work, it makes a lot more sense to download the Godot source code for free and maybe hire 1 engine programmer, than to pay that kind of money for the source and for support.
But I agree with you, you kind of have to go with the skills that are marketable. I think Godot will be there in a few years in the small or maybe mid range category. Certainly for lower end mobile games I think Godot is already there. And for 2D pixel art PC games, it is fine right now. Maybe not so much on the high end 3D, but I think it looks good enough. Console support is an issue, though most people complaining never had any chance of shipping a game on a console in any event. But for larger studios this is a huge issue, since most of the money is on console in terms of high end games. Mobile is a bigger market overall, but console games are more expensive and typically have much bigger releases. Mobile works on the long tail. Maybe not a blockbuster launch, but you could have players for years paying on micro-transactions. Or ad revenue if you have a lot of players.
Neither of which Godot does particularly well. Though there are community plug-ins and stuff, they are not the out of box experience you get like on Unity. So if you want to add ads into a mobile game, this is all done for you already. On Godot it is almost there, and people do try, but that is the nature of open-source. You can certainly still do it, but it requires more work on your end to connect to the ad partners or integrate SDKs yourself. Also stuff like DLC, IAP, SteamWorks, etc. are much easier on the bigger engines.
In terms of C++, you should certainly learn it. Especially for coding interviews, they might expect that you code in C++ (though more commonly C) so you will need to understand pointers, how to create a linked list from scratch, reverse a character array without a temporary variable, stuff like that. So learning C/C++ is pretty important. I learned C++ for a long time, though I don't use it anymore. I've kind of simplified my life, and I don't have to impress anyone with fancy programming. I'd rather use something like Python and just get the job done faster. But still, you should know it, since those skills apply to everything. For example, I was able to learn GDScript in a weekend, because I already know like a dozen languages, or at least 2 or 3 very well.
The language is actually not even important, the concepts apply anywhere. If you understand logic and control flow, know how to do math, and can read documentation, then you can do any job, even in a language you've never used in your life. It's about the algorithm, which is above the language. So if you can clearly, in English, describe in your mind what you are trying to do and what you expect to happen, then it can be accomplished with any technology. The learning is just about understanding the API, what the names of buttons do, when you have to do one thing or another due to the design of the architecture, etc. That is the learning part, which still takes time no matter what.
For me, I think that process takes about 1 year. So even though I can code a simple game on the first day, it takes months or maybe a year to fully understand. This was the same for me in Unity and Unreal. I did work with Unity for a while, though I never released anything. But I had some pretty cool prototypes, I just never showed them to anyone. My previous employer was super strict about having side businesses, so I was not allowed to work on any games or release them. Granted, I still experimented with stuff, I just couldn't sell anything. Most big companies are like this unless you are a big shot and can negotiate a custom contract. Which is why I am trying to do the indie thing and work with small freelance gigs and not work at another big tech company or game studio. But if you want to go that route, then yeah, you have to know the tools they are using.
