Another idea: line up some dev consulting work that would enable you to spend more time per week (in aggregate) than the 2-3 hours per day you're spending now. Consulting offers higher hourly wages and more flexibility, generally speaking.
There are clear downsides too. You would need to source these contracts yourself and figure out health insurance for your family.
Indeed. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to enable CD. It's still super early in this space, as shown by the fact that most companies have homegrown tooling (usually some scripts on top of Jenkins). It shouldn't be that way. When you think about other categories within DevOps (observability, security, alerting) there are many out-of-the-box tools to choose from such that one would never say "I think I'll build an observability tool from scratch here".