What you mentioned about indie/agency is roughly how I feel about tech startups at this point in my life - have had a lot of colleagues get into them, and have seen the very attractive rates they pay for my skill set, but I got into stable boring corporate and haven't looked back - there's downsides, but having steady benefits, a reliable paycheck, having actual printed, reviewed-by-lawyers policies, actual PTO, a formal job description! It's worth it to me these days. I don't have the energy anymore to do a 60+ hour week and be informally on call all the time and just do whatever needs doing. Leaving my last job, I got an actual severance package. With the state of the world, I'm no shill, but I'm on the ship that I'll be more likely to have some advanced warning before it sinks rather than being caught off guard by a capsize.

It really does suck that everything has been thrown in a blender so many times in a row because there's a lot of potential out there, but this isn't a fantastic time for risk-taking. That health insurance... Yeah. For real.