I’ve spent a lot of time coaching players at your level and there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what’s going on here.
Front line players absolutely have the economy to go t2 on their own, and I like to prove this regularly. Paying tech is simply to speed up your t2 con (and everyone else’s) by ~30 seconds.
If you’re too busy to pay for a t2 con you’re even more too busy to build t2 mexes, so you don’t need one in the first place. (I usually overpay for my t2 con to speed it up even more)
Your units should not be meat grinding. Take battles you can win or back off to safety.
Static defences are more cost effective than mobile units - that gives you the freedom to invest in your t2 transition.
Finally, there’s lots of viable diversity even in the first few minutes of the game (even up to 50os). If it doesn’t seem that way, there’s an opportunity to try new things and figure them out.
FWIW, meta pressures exist without an entire industry dedicated to them.
I’ve been playing BAR since it was called Balanced Annihilation and it peaked at 1 concurrent 8v8 daily and there was little/no youtube presence to speak of. Meta pressure was still huge, to the point that trying (now-meta) then-off-meta strategies would have you mocked, called a troll, and sometimes kicked from the room. Pretty much everyone was a meta slave, except for a few (mostly top) players who had their own quirky meta-rejecting style.
I think there’s a global desire for comfort/safety which drives meta, and this works without an industry. Copying is safe, playing the same map endlessly is comfortable, and fun for fun’s sake is neither. And ego seems to have something to do with it too. Players with less ego seem to experiment more, change things up more, break the meta more.