But what if you have newborns or an exhausting family? Figuring out how to do all of this oneself on top of all of that is pretty stressful.

its a mindset, lots of us find these chores either fun, or even relaxing.

Wife/kids aren't going to bother you while you're mowing for example, can't hear them while a chainsaw is running...

I'm working on a website to help new home buyers prepare to buy a home. You enter a few details about your financial situation and location and I present your "home preparedness" summary. I then present a list of homes in the area for you to browse, each with a score to show how affordable it is for you. Finally, you can save homes to your account to track changes over time as we help you to prepare for your first (or subsequent) home purchase.

Right now it's a Django application that I've been working on for a few weeks now. I hope to have a MVP ready that I could present here soon.

I'm sorry you've had to deal with these misleading posts; many of them are not written well and over-inflate the word "senior" in their descriptions.

Do you feel your main issue then is onboarding onto companies not willing to provide training but you're eager to put the time in to learn somehow?

I think the issue is that you can't really be a senior developer in a tech stack unless you have experience in that stack. Every time I switch stacks, I screw myself out of a chance of that next level compensation. Starting over is basically throwing away the previous knowledge.

I can put in time to learn. Most of the time the biggest issue is that internal policies, procedures, and systems are not adequately documented.

I agree, many of these job postings use misleading terms.

Regarding your use of your personal network and talking directly to companies, do you feel this approach has always worked well for you or do you feel like something is still missing whenever you search/apply for new roles?

I feel like I've been lucky and realise that one day my network may not have any good offers. It worked, but I wish it didn't have to.