[59jmp]

Sounds like you learnt a valuable lesson (albeit the hard way) about slaving away on low-visibility internal maintenance work for years on end.

The most obvious paths are either to focus more on becoming a deep technical expert, or alternatively being a manager, because for the most part the market just doesn't value > 10 years experience as an individual contributor, with few and rare exceptions.

Although I'm currently employed, I'm also pretty much stuck in a rut, if you are interested email me (in profile) / let's see if we can share notes + work through it together.