[maximente]

don't take this personally, but you sound lazy, afraid, and without a mission in life. if you're seriously considering what you yourself have called an "irrelevant" and "outdated" thing that will take up, in all likelihood, multiple years of your life, you're clearly stalling.

write down what you want out of life. without this, no decision matters because any decision just advances time without working towards a goal. perhaps "making intellectually curious stuff for a living" ends up on there, perhaps it doesn't. but without this, nothing matters because there's no direction.

i have no idea what success looks like to you, but i'm fairly sure you can bootstrap yourself with a 24 month window of $2000 living expenses. so, if you have $0 today, save up $50k and you have a 2 year runway. if you can't figure out how to save $50k quickly with 7 years exp as an SWE, or live on less than $2k/mo, you're not even trying. with that, you have 750 days to figure out/demonstrate to the world that you are worth $2k/month. that is eminently doable, imo.