US-based advice only, but start by getting out of any tier 1/2 city (read: effectively any city with unreasonable cost-of-living). Landing any of these jobs will allow you to easily build your network, which can be 100% of your job referrals thereafter. Some examples:

1. Banking or insurance. Both industries provide high-paying, great-benefits, low-stress jobs (assuming you're OK with bureaucracy or can ignore it) using anything from ancient technology to modern k8s. Here are some anecdotes:

a. Friend works at a small regional bank with ~150b in assets. Their job is to maintain (amongst other less important ones) a classic ASP application which generates monthly compliance reports that get submitted to the fed. Critical work but trivially easy (if you know classic ASP!). The software runs on a single potato VM; development is done on a clone potato VM. They don't even use version control for this as it has been pending approval for 3 years... For this, they make $150k + 15% 401k match + unlimited PTO (forced 2 weeks per quarter off). Rent in that area is ~800/mo for a 2bdr.

b. College acquaintance does boring ASP.NET WebForms development for a regional insurance carrier. They cover 7 counties out of 30ish in said state. They maintain the member portal for all insured members, which runs in their local datacenter with failover a few states away. Captive audience, known size, no need for fancy scaling or load balancing as they have one active season (open enrollment), easy to prepare for. They plan on migrating from WebForms to .NET Core MVC possibly in the next 5 years. No need to rush, though! Same as above; six figure, good match, lots of PTO, similar rent.

c. Insurance for a major carrier, remote. Think Excellus/Aetna/etc. Boring ASP.NET MVC development with jQuery. The engineer has no idea what hardware they run, as despite working on production features, they never deploy any actual code - that happens 15 management levels up the chain. Said engineer has heard that, if they want a test environment, it is requested through IT and provisioned via VMWare, but has no idea if that is what production runs on. Much higher compensation than the previous two.

2. SMB consulting. SMB accounts for what, 95%+ of businesses in the US? Hit up any city anywhere and you will find 50-100 small IT/software consulting companies. There is plenty of the pie to go around if you aren't looking for exit numbers. These companies tackle everything. Custom AS400 solutions? Sure why not. Software written on a version of PHP so low you can count it on your coccyx? Sure, we migrate that. Mission critical software running on Bob's Laptop but Bob retired and nobody has his password and now the entire line is shut down until we can find a fix? Yeah, we can fix that. SMB consulting is really where it's at if you want wonky, boring stuff.

3. Education of the higher (college) variety. I did a stint at my uni for ~5 years and they are the very definition of boring. "Cutting edge" for a uni is paying Oracle a few million bucks for an SIS system that somehow runs slower than their custom built AS400 implementation that Frank from IT wrote himself 25 years ago. If you're somewhere modern, you might have some sort of VM infrastructure somewhere, but you'll be caught up in budgeting for at least a year trying to figure out what code to bill that shit to. In that time you'll find another department tossing out an old Itanium with 16GB of RAM that will absolutely just barely run your critical Spring 1.0 application tossed together by some students who haven't quite got to a web engineering course yet.

The biggest way to find these is networking. I have not had a proper interview in 25 years - every single job has been a referral over a coffee or beer that starts with, "So I've got this job, it's a little weird, but hear me out..."