If you want to make EUR100k/year go on upwork and charge EUR65/hour, take 4 weeks holiday and allow a 40% margin for non-billable hours. You can make that hourly rate doing any number of things that require no CS knowledge.
(To be fair, this was all years ago, I haven't done any freelancing recently. But I can't imagine it's changed that much.)
it just bugs me to read these comments that makes it sound so easy to earn that much in upwork or similar platforms without context or disclaimers
The ranking system is gamed to death and is meaningless - all those low-quality spammers are highly rated, so having reputation helps very little.
The spammers driving the rates down also mean that even if you do manage to get a higher-paying gig, the client may have significantly higher expectations than what's reasonable (as they were fed a distorted view of the market).
It's pretty much impossible to live on in Western Europe or the US.
For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks.
Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates.
But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).
I have never sold my time on upwork but I have bought thousands of hours of time and I have regularly had freelancers move out of my price range due to demand for their skills.
I’m sure there is a cap but the market is global. It is well above what many could earn locally. Over the years I have seen a convergence of rates in developed and developing nations.
I think you need to distinguish it from regular contracting.