There are plenty of SWE jobs adjacent to ML that you'll probably fit right into. I specialized in networking in grad school and was always building web management tools for project. Turned out liking the app development tasks better and went that route.
When you do want to focus time on a side project what's been most effective for me is to mitigate that risk by using stable income from a corporate job to establish savings. Then use that savings to take some time off to focus on a side project.
The outreach from smaller companies seems to be accelerating. I've started getting regular inquiries on an AngelList profile that I filled out 4 years ago and forgot about.
So cool to see work on a common language and infrastructure for solving authorization problems. I feel like we've all reinvented this wheel dozens of times in our careers.
I rarely use LinkedIn but just about every time I do I'm using it find a new job. As far as value for time spent it's definitely orders of magnitude more effective than any other social network.
When I began hosting web sites around 2002 we started with a 1.5mbit leased line. It's amazing how many requests we handled with what is now considered so little bandwidth. Of course the media attached to web sites has grown larger since then.
I can relate to the need for unique experiences... The older I get the more I feel like I need to travel. Especially when most of my work is done from home. I feel energized for weeks after I get back from a trip.