I price quite high as a freelance react specialist. I worked at a javashop building enterprise pharma apps. I made frontend technology decisions and bet on /early adopted React when it first came out in 2013, open sourced some stuff to fill in holes in the ecosystem since it was still immature, spoke at a couple conferences, gave a few workshops. With this portfolio it is really easy to land clients at high rates from the HN whoishiring threads. I have had zero successful leads from linkedin and recruiters, it always falls apart when we talk about rates. I've learned that your common recruiter and linkedin manager cant differentiate between okay talent and high end talent. CTOs read HN whoshiring threads and those are the people who can tell the difference. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustingetz

TLDR: make predictions about the future, specialize, be right.

Edit: I post in the HN whoshiring freelancer threads and potential clients reach out to me, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998249

Edit: I have a friend who does wordpress freelance for local small businesses, her business is extremely different than mine as is her story, there are many approaches that can work, the key is to understand your market