Look into web3/blockchain/NFT technology, most of it has been around less than 2 years so experience is less of a hard requirement than in other fields of software engineering.
Gonna hard disagree on this one. Blockchain is a flash in the pan niche tool. There are some legitimate uses for it, but most of it is all style and no substance. It's way too narrow a focus, with far more people playing around than there are jobs. You'd pick up general software skills along the way, but there are better ways to do that with a focus on more useful and practical technologies.
Solidity (language for Ethereum Smart Contracts) is relatively easy to learn. There's also tons of free resources in learning them (https://cryptozombies.io/). I would say this would be one of the hottest languages of 2022.
Yeah Solidity has many resources and is worth learning. Solana is another smart contract platform which uses Rust, and Rust is a fantastic language, though it is tough.
Both ecosystems use Node.js for scripting/tests/frontend so that is going to be advantage to learn.