My mother was a successful fused glass artist. Her works sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, but in the end, she made close to minimum wage per hour, as you described. Art, or anything made by hand, doesn't scale well.
I've started an Instagram account where I post some of my work, but I've found out that I'm really bad at social media for marketing purposes. I'm currently debating whether it's worth it to become better at marketing or SEO in order to promote my stuff, but even though it is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, it is the opposite of what I want to do.
I originally started this plan to have a workday where I don't look at the screen for 8 hours, and now I've gotten myself in a situation where I look at a screen in my free time to learn how to promote my business.
You're right, art just doesn't scale well. Maybe it's best if I continue to just do it for fun and gift it to friends and family. Not everything needs to be a business.
What I've seen work instead is to charge much higher rates of $1,000 or more. Think to yourself, hypothetically speaking, if I were to charge $1,000 or more for my art or my woodworking etc. what kind of items would justify that price point and then just focus on those.
Then when it comes to marketing and selling, pursue a relationship based selling approach rather than an ecommerce transactional approach.
Once you start getting social proof of happy customers you can often take the same work that was selling for $1,000 and sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 or even more.
That's the key to making a sustainable income with art or handcrafted work these days.