It’s not very difficult to do financially if you don’t mind moving to a lower cost of living country. You can live pretty well for 20k USD in many parts of the world.
The point of using a good framework is that conventions and best practices are enforced. If your building a Rails sits there are a set of conventions everyone follows. When a new developer onboards onto the project they know how to extend the code base.
When you read in clusters around the same topic the same concepts will get reinforced over and over again.