For some reason, hiring culture considers any employment gap as signaling a poor candidate. I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is that someone who can take a year off work doesn’t have enough debt to make for a captive employee.
I think that opinion is changing. I regularly see engineers come in with gaps, and rarely do they not have a good explanation for it that anyone but the worst managers would be ok with. Whether it's child-rearing, testing early retirement, starting their own thing, whatever. About the only thing that would raise a flag for me was "I was in prison" and only because for regulatory reasons in my industry it's not possible to employ convicted felons.
Lucky you. 18 months job searching here, 10 years of experience - I absolutely could tell that I was seeing fewer contacts, interviews, offers, etc. in months 7-18 than months 1-6.
Or those hiring are just suspicious of people who don't make the same mistakes they do.