I think you may be mistaken on the 40's to 50's part. What you don't see from experienced, well aged professional software engineers is they probably don't wan

I think you may be mistaken on the 40's to 50's part. What you don't see from experienced, well aged professional software engineers is they probably don't want to work in SV or at startups because they may see it as silliness (take home pay beating out lottery ticket options). They don't care much about new & shiny frameworks, etc. unless it helps solving a problem in a better way. They probably have seen new tools/frameworks come and go a few times. Maybe look for opportunities to work on tougher problems to solve. Maybe explore other options like project management or people management? Don't be fooled into thinking those are the only path to more salary though. It's also common to forget things with how many libraries and apis we have to use. A common concept in a lot of these is pushing complexity down the stack so you don't have to have it in mind when doing things. Least used things get forgotten.