It's likely not as common as it seems. Personally I only ever heard of some mythical software engineers from the US pursuing woodworking, but not from anywhere

It's likely not as common as it seems. Personally I only ever heard of some mythical software engineers from the US pursuing woodworking, but not from anywhere else. Maybe in the US it's a lucrative field and it's common for software engineers in the US to live in houses with plenty of space to do woodworking and where the products of woodworking might actually be useful, so it's something they can play with at home and consider a nice skill to have in case they get fed up with software industry.