It seems also that precisely the privacy-destroying centralizing ad-selling machine companies, are the ones that occupy all our mind-space and have the money and technically interesting challenges. (Oh, and there is also fintech!)
I now am doing ok freelancing (mostly for my previous employer and some other small music software companies from Berlin) and doing some open-source on the side. But it is often hard to motivate myself to get out there and network or find stuff to earn money. Sometimes I consider going back to academia, but my feeling is that over the last years the attempts at quantifying academic output have risen competition to completely unhealthy levels (as my academic friend says: if he has to think in 6-month/project/paper timelines, where is the "long-term" in publicly funded research?).
At least it is easy to find a job that pays decent, which is a very good position to be in compared most of my friends of my generation. And I love software engineering itself. Yet I often wish I could just go on UBI and do open-source stuff all day.