Not me, but a friend... She was nearly 10 years into a career, most of it at a FAANG and the rest FAANG-adjacent. All as an ML engineer. Her spouse is also a software engineer.
She left her engineering job ~18 months ago to study music on the way to a music career (she had studied a lot of music during her earlier school years and has been composing for years). The music program involved everything from the physics of sound to composition, production, engineering, performance, etc. It was a deeply intensive one year program that she has now completed.
She keeps getting offers to do software around music (effects, workflow management, etc.) as there aren't enough well qualified software/ML engineers around that deeply understand the composition / production / engineering process. But she wants to be more on the music side. She has taken one such gig to pick up a mentor who composed the scores for several prominent video games, an area she's interested in.
She still has more than a year of runway, so she's taking 2024 to generate a portfolio of her own music and sort of build a brand (my words, not hers).
So, she's finished the school part, but hasn't completed a career transition. It's exceedingly unlikely that she'll ever replace her tech comp, but that was never the goal. It's been great for her mental health. Part of that is that she's been very actively working on her mental health through all of this. This new journey has required its own kind of resiliency because the path is far from clear and requires a lot of reflection and a lot of strategy planning about how to proceed. A supportive spouse has been a huge plus.