Salaries are an information game (that employees aren't winning), so it's limited, the extent that I'm willing to bottleneck my income at whatever Glassdoor/Linkedin horseshit a company is working off of. You can easily quadruple your income doing smart contract work, especially if you can reuse code across projects, whereas for salaried roles, you are mostly going to get incremental raises over your past salaried jobs.

There are different ebbs and flows to each type of work, so it's worth trying both for folks to see what they like. Job hopping for raises works for some people, but it also seems to lead to a lot of churn and lower expectations of trust and loyalty for salaried employees in the tech industry. Not my style. A business cutting edge-to-edge with another business is a more reciprocal arrangement, but there are some downsides and more stress.