I left programming for about six years to do grad school in Classics. I came back because programming was way more fun. The writing was on the wall when I started writing scripts to scan dactylic hexameter and convert L'Année philologique entries to bibtex. :-)
I spent six months doing a (failed) startup with a student from the biz school, and then I started taking freelance gigs. I got a few job offers, but I was enjoying self-employment so much, I wound up just sticking with freelancing. Today I'm making more than I would as a non-FAANG employee. I'm 44 and haven't felt any age discrimination.
Ironically, getting contract work is way easier than getting an FTE offer. You have a 30-minute call with one programmer and another with the owner/manager, and you're hired. No leetcode, day-long on-site visits away from home, or unpaid trial projects.
While your rates are still low, you can also find a lot of work by reaching out to web design firms and presenting yourself as an expert in X. For example if they mostly have PHP employees but you do Rails or D3, they will be happy to bring you on. Even with expensive rates, I still get subcontracting work when people need a Postgres expert.
In my case I was still very comfortable building web applications,
but the six months at my own startup let me learn Rails & Heroku and gain confidence that I could still get things done. If she can also spend half a year learning and building something that proves her skills, I think she will de-risk herself for lots of employers.
Or she may be able to find a lot of Cobol opportunities immediately. I know someone who was at a bank doing sales, and they gave him paid on-the-job training to switch to Cobol work. (I'm happy to talk with her and make a connection if she is interested.) Now he's applying at IBM. So it seems like there is plenty of work out there still.