I get the sense that digital nomadism is akin to a multi-level marketing scam; the only people making actual money are the ones recruiting others to the "lifestyle" by advertising their blogs, books and guides (see OP).
The bad part was that I ended up in my early 30's with no money, no job, and a very unattractive CV/Resume. The good part is that I was socially transformed. I'm way more confident now, especially around groups of strangers.
I never wrote about this before nor have I ever written a blog, but I met plenty of people living similar lives. Anyway I guess my point is that there are plenty of people out there doing things without blogging about it. But you're not going to meet them online.
"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds [women] and fast cars – the rest I just squandered" -- George Best
I am curious to know what kind of profession has the option to be a digital nomad. They only one I figured is being a journalist or a writer.
What types of business do you do being a nomad?
Roles that are what is now called "developer relations" or similar effectively force you into an adjacent lifestyle.
Freelance development can often support this kind of thing.
Basically, any sort of remote job.
What's kind of amusing/terrible is that while doing this I was almost always living in very high COL areas, while a digital nomad would be off somewhere extremely inexpensive. Oh well, money isn't everything.
When I was doing it for my friend, it was never that big a deal. But stuff did come up every now and then that needed to be handled.
Having said that, you'll need a home base where you "officially" live and can legally work from--and, if you're an employee of a company (i.e. not an independent consultant), you probably need to be up-front about what you're doing and many companies may have issues with the legal ramifications.
That said, in practice, before the pandemic I traveled about a third of the time so having some sort of nominal home base in the US and otherwise being on the road really wouldn't have been that much of a stretch compared to my usual. I do marketing-related stuff for a computer software company.
Becoming a digital nomad isn't about making money... in fact if you do it properly it's at best break-even or slightly cheaper than just renting a place to live in the US and staying put, but could be vastly more expensive. It's about exploring the world, expanding your viewpoint, and inspiring you to think differently. Going abroad helped my engineering work immensely, and also gave me a chance use time zones to my advantage to improve my health by adapting my sleep cycle to my body's needs rather than the whims of an employer. It also got me moving much more despite working on a computer all day, which greatly improved my health as well. Being able to leave work and actually go do something new, interesting, and exciting each day had a positive effect on work/life balance and was the perfect way to combat the burnout I was experiencing as a senior engineer before I stepped on the plane.
I don't advocate being a digital nomad, because I think it's something that's not for everybody and it had its own set of challenges and stressors. But I don't think it's some sort of MLM get-rich quick scheme by people either. You are only seeing the aspect of it shown by social media which is dominated by "influencers" using their skill at marketing and manipulation to enrich themselves. But if you talk to most people who lived the lifestyle, they were normal joes doing normal jobs, just in a location-independent fashion. Not everyone who is a digital nomad is a white 20-something from New York or LA that decided to take their affiliate blog on the road and write a book to be self-published by Amazon, probably less than 10% of the digital nomads I met along the way were like that. I met a lot of people during my time due to using coworking facilities in so many places.
I don't understand how you could be skeptical of the idea, it's pretty simple. Step 1, have remote job or contract work. Step 2, choose not to stay in one location. The end.
What I've learned is it's way better to just do stuff and improve things as you go (be that the optimal way to be a digital nomad or whatever ;)