Do you want a simple ReactJS freelancer, or a React/Redux freelancer?
Webpack costs extra.
But seriously, the 'price-range' of a freelancing javascript developer that is acquainted with modern frameworks like React, is the full range that any freelancer, in any business can have.
Probably the very low (<10$/hour) and very high (200$+/hour) ends of the spectrum don't happen very often in this job, but still if I tell you 10$/hour to 150$/hour what would that mean?
Also it depends highly on the nature of the task. Short term will usually command higher price than long-term.
I sympathize with your trouble but what you describe seems exaggerated to me.
If within a year you made only a thousand dollars, why didn't you spend more time working on a side project, or sharpening your skills? Maybe the ones you currently have are not much in demand?
Also, freelancing sites do have a lot of low quality jobs, but if you spend some time digging around you can find decent jobs; e.g. I, a poor country resident, have found jobs that made me in a week as much as you claim to have made within the year.
And btw, I'm thirty-something, university drop-out and with a couple of huge holes in my CV. But that's not what I bring forward when asking for a job. Instead I project the most confident image that I have for myself and that's my advice to you, too (i.e. don't focus on the negativity of your current situation, it's not going to help you find a job).
I remember buying the official edition of Mandrake 10.0, while my previous experience was only with Slackware.
It was so easy to install that I completely stopped using Windows, ever since.
Truth is though, that for me it died right about when it became Mandriva and Ubuntu was the new shinny distro, that wasn't only easy to install but it'd sent the disks right to your home.
This is one of the most annoyingly designed sites I've ever seen.
The float-to-the right-to-see-the-background effect, reminds of the awfulness of MySpace when DHTML was a thing. Only it's worse.
Also, the article loses a lot of credibility when it responds to anyone calling the ad-infested web horrible, with this:
""" No, it really wasn’t – it was perfectly fine, you’re just being a snob. The Web works well for me with the ads displayed. """
Yes, it's perfectly fine... If you want to punch-the-monkey, a dozen popups beneath your window, moving images that can cause photo-epilepsy all over the place and of course the latest trend:
"Oh, you scrolled a couple of times? Let me show you a huge overlay ad with a very dark backdrop(that isn't always click-to-dismiss) and a very obscure close button."
Truth is that people are naturally becoming more resistant to ads, which leads to making them more intrusive. And this in turn leads anyone that can, to seek ways to get rid of them.
This may continue for a few years, but I think that publishers should begin preparing for alternate sources of income, instead of hoping to go back in time.
Disclaimer: I've used ads, made even some(little) money of them. And I use AdBlock because the web is truly awful without it.
Being a progtammer is being a problem solver. The language hardly matters.
Try to solve this in your head with pseudo code and do not overcomplicate it. It's a very simple problem.
Also at your level, don't think of the language string handling facilities or other advanced Api's.
Just control structures and arrays.
Finally, it's fine to ask for help when trying to build something, but when trying to learn, it's cheating yourself of the opportunity to have that moment were you actually understand the problem.
So my advice is, go back to solving the problem and don't come back here to see for possible answers until you have it and just want to compare solutions.
I don't have a degree either, but having dropped out from a computer engineering university department (where I did pass most of the programming courses) and having maintained my own free software project, gave me a head start when I decided to take the web-dev route as a career.
At that point, I studied php/mysql,js/jquery and html5/css.
These were enough to land a job as a frontend Dev, but the amount of studying that I did afterwards I began working, was orders of magnitude more than before.
So I think your list is very complete for a start but prepare for lots of reading related to the specifics of the jobs you land.
Also, why limit yourself to local gigs? Even if you don't like remote work from your home, you can't ignore that it opens a huge market to you.