Working on interesting things and being a corporate code droid requires the same skillset[1].

  > unqualified for senior roles

Lol. You just landed one 3 months ago. On a different note, "senior developer" is such a joke-title, don't you think? In what other profession can you be a "senior" with less than a year of experience? It's only in sw dev...

The inconvenient truth is, you can't make a living of hobby projects - some can pull it off, but that's always exceptional. That's why they are hobby projects - they usually cost money rather than make any. On the other hand you need to skill up for hobby projects also. You can write a compiler in JS, sure. But should you? Upskilling is required anyway, so why not get on it, regardless of how you decide about your future

[1]: corpo jobs require also ass kissing, which is an art in itself