If you don't want to go the whole way where you have literally your own shop, are trying to hunt for your own clients, market yourself, etc. going to a platform

If you don't want to go the whole way where you have literally your own shop, are trying to hunt for your own clients, market yourself, etc. going to a platform is something to consider. I don't love Upwork but some people have good experiences there. Toptal is sort of midrange and then there are some more niche ones like tribe.ai (which I can vouch for as being great for talent having worked there for some time) and there's also braintrust which has an interesting story about the community having more ownership but I don't have insider details on how it's really run