I worked for almost 4 years in a startup that developed a platform for white-label casinos. Now I work in a different field, but the experience from there was more than enough. Short answer: yes, developers in online casinos are not just cogs. They are literally the "framework" of the whole work. According to https://starofmysore.com/the-role-of-software-developers-in-online-casinos/, in a classic web application you make landings, CRUD, maybe some business processes. And in a casino, everything is more complicated and sensitive. You work with real money, and here every bit and byte matters. The roles are divided, of course - front, backend, devops, but often you have to intersect. For example, in our team, backend developers wrote modules that worked with payment APIs: banking gateways, cryptocurrencies, authentication systems. A mistake - and the user loses money. Therefore, each release goes through staging with transaction emulation, unit tests, logging. A separate topic is game mechanics. Many platforms work with providers like NetEnt, Pragmatic, but there are also their own games. And here the very development comes to the fore: the front is written on Canvas/WebGL, but the main logic is on the server - winning calculation, bonus calculation, free spins, and so on. Everything must be certified and not change after publication. We even had a moment when we had to rebuild the game build again, because we accidentally updated the RNG version and lost certification for 3 weeks.