Smart contract Audits and creation is pretty lucrative, with payment for work generally in a currency that's not in a period of 'Transitory Inflation'. I've been learning rust/ substrate tho, ETH is a bit dated by now.
"Dad, how come we are poor"
"Well you see son, when i was younger I traded all my real money for fake online tokens because i thought it'd make me a millionaire"
In all fairness, if you didn't take some profit over the last 6 months the fault lies within.
You can do any kind of work and once paid convert it to ETH so getting paid in it is no difference (I’d say it is more inconvenient as you need to convert some to fiat and then deal with taxes)
And instead in a currency that's in a period of 'Transitory Panic Selloff'.