I'm on the market and really like the idea of a jobs marketplace and recruiters that prioritize work-life balance first. I've been looking at Upwork and things

I'm on the market and really like the idea of a jobs marketplace and recruiters that prioritize work-life balance first. I've been looking at Upwork and things have changed quite a bit since when I was using eLance, oDesk, Guru, etc 5 years ago. My specialty is PHP and iOS/Android development, and back then there might be 3-5 bids on gigs after a client listing was up for a few days. Now it's 10-20 the very first day. My market at least seems to be saturated. I also look on LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor. From what I can tell, just about everything has moved to enterprise, SEO and cybersecurity. The prerequisites now are AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, and specific job roles or languages experience rather than general programming or problem-solving acumen. The vast majority of jobs are full-time. I can find a full-time job for $100,000 per year much more easily than a part-time job for $50,000. Has anyone had any luck working part-time or remote sustainably? I'm concerned that as we head up to the next economic downturn and beyond, that programming will get more and more specialized to the point that it becomes IT. So more about support and maintaining existing infrastructure than breaking new ground or solving new problems. I also feel that most of the new disciplines like SEO and dev ops arguably have little or nothing to do with programming and probably shouldn't be grouped with it. They are representative of the ethical/legal shortcomings of search engines, and conceptual issues with software architecture planning vs agile spinning (chasing profit at all cost rather than paying down technical debt). I guess to me, they represent a shift from the egalitarian future of the 90s and twenty-teens to one where profit trumps quality of life for certain people. Am I misguided here? Is there any chance of getting programmers back to having somewhat independent lives like they enjoyed in the 80s and 90s? This last year I've been considering walking away from programming because it's not about the money anymore. I just don't know if I can give up my whole psyche in 1 and 2 year blocks of my life toiled away on someone else's problems anymore. I admit that I'm actually kind of in crisis about this. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!