I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews.
“Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.
So do you consider a “low hiring bar” the director talking about strategy and finding out from the candidates past history that he can probably solve their real world issues?
If he needs to be at two potential customers sites (large health care companies) does he need someone who can “grind leetcode” or does he need someone that can talk to the CxO, the infrastructure team, the development team, etc without embarrassing himself?
But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies.
By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc.
I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on.
Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career.
Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.