Is my 20 years in another industry worth anything here?

The bottleneck is no longer people who can build. It is people who know what is worth building and can tell when the output is wrong.

Nineteen years inside a process means you know its exceptions, its failure modes and its real costs. That is exactly the knowledge the tools cannot supply and a new graduate has not lived.

The move is to stop presenting yourself as a career changer and start presenting yourself as a domain expert who uses the tools.