But for any individual founder, if you want to aim for 'successful enough to be relatively wealthy and worry free' then 'bootstrapped' is the way to go. If you aim for an outsize success, wealth for the next N generations and massive impact on the world (for good or for bad) it's going to be very hard to avoid the VC track.
I wrote about this long ago, but it is still quite relevant:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...