Ask HN: Is Indie-Hacking Solopreneurship a viable strategy?

To avoid unnecessary disputes by "Indie-Hacking Solopreneurship" (IHS) I specifically mean building tech (software) based products (SaaS, apps, APIs and anything in between) alone (or in a tiny team of peers) with an ultimate goal of creating an asset that will provide a good living to its authors.

I wonder what is the evidence that this can work out from the economics perspective?

Are those few success stories you heard of — just lucky exceptions hiding a graveyard of half-dead endeavours you know nothing about?

By this post I would like to collect any evidence, stories, reasoning for and against the idea that this IHS thing is just a hyped temporary thing at best, no more scalable economically than gambling.

What signs and thoughts do I see to support it:

1. Majority of products I see (that "build in public" thing etc.) are feeding off the same comunity.

I.e. they selling each other some tools (fancy screenshot editors for marketing, "grow your twitter" kind of things, ebooks) that would hopefully help to finally create and sell your dream product.

It looks like the same old ponzi scheme in disguise. And economically is (money just circle around the same community inflating expectations on each revolution).

2. Isn't it so that tiny portion of the products eventually grow into real startups or businesses with employees, scaling, different priorities etc? Which looks like all this IHS was just a mask in the first place.

While the rest end up with inspiring/regretful blog posts after few years of struggle, or die right from the start if the author is lucky enough?

Even though the authors are often really talented and hardworking people, sometimes even finding their market (that eventually slips away).

3. If an indie hacker finds some good market niche and it's big enough or growing — doesn't it put him immidiately in the competition with hundreds of small and big companies (the bigger the niche - the bigger the companies)?

What can this hacker then possibly do to win this battle long-term?

If this niche is small (long tail), yet big enough to support the founder — doesn't this put him in the competition with thousands of other hackers aiming at low hanging fruit?

Let's say our hacker is the most brilliant one in the niche. Doesn't the mere fact of thousands of people tearing the small niche apart make this a loose-loose game anyway?

Of course all above just based on personal observations, which are obviously skewed.

This is why I'm looking for other perspectives, examples, counter-examples and anything meaningful you have to say on this.

Thank you for reading to this point :)