Totally industry standard. I've been one of such freelancers in the past. If we were going to boil this down to a scientific dip sample, then yes - I'm sampling a skewed group. Since we don't have any means of doing this, I'm simply writing about my experience of what I'm hearing across, what I would consider, a broad spectrum of our industry. Judging by my inbox of relieved freelancers/industry professionals today, my post is resonating with a whole subset of people who have been quietly suffering thinking there is something wrong with what they're doing/their work; when it's how the industry does business now, that's changed.
What I'm seeing in mobile developer meetups is a shift toward freelancing. Basically, web development is shifting from freelancers towards tools & in-house maintenance programmers. Mobile development is shifting from startup founders to freelancers. The startup scene is shifting from mobile to IoT (hardware), VR, and wearables.
In other words, the technology cycle is coming around again. We went through the same thing in the early 2000s, as it became nearly impossible to get a non-maintenance job as a desktop software developer and the web freelance market took off (just on the heels of the dot-com bubble bursting). Also, just as the shift in web-development from well-funded dot-coms to individual freelancers and small startups led to the "Web 2.0" renaissance, we might see a "Mobile 2.0" renaissance with a new generation of technologies (Swift, MBaaS, Dagger, RxJava/RxCocoa) that changes how we do mobile development.
(I'm not sure we'll see a "Web 3.0" renaissance - "Desktop 1.0" was the PC, CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple Basic, etc., and "Desktop 2.0" was Macintosh and Win32 development, but what was supposed to be "Desktop 3.0" - OS X, desktop Linux, and .NET on the client - remained fairly niche specialties. I wonder if React/Polymer will go the same way.)
I don't think anyone is questioning whether your work resonates with a whole subset of people; I think we're questioning whether conferences and a full inbox are all the evidence we need to accept broad pronouncements about the state of an industry.
The number of people that are sending emails asking the author for work is increasing. This could be because more people are working in the industry - but I'd guess that this has been factored in.
The second point backing this up was the reduced number of conferences. Assuming there were more people who have work then there should be more conferences - even if there were more people out of work.