It is immensely satisfying to build something that you believe in and succeed in selling it. I founded my company in 2019 and my experiencing and motivations in bootstrapping mirror yours.
We are in year 4 (commercials) and 6 (product development) at Factor House[1].
We build enterprise tooling for streaming systems (Apache Kafka and Apache Flink mostly). Selling software to enterprise customers is different from B2C as the sales cycles can be endless and most likely your cashflow might be more lumpy, but at the end of the day it's a very powerful thing to be profitable and independent.
As @yevpats points out sometimes the bootstrapping story does miss some details, in our case we invested roughly $500k to get through the pre-commercial period, to achieve that we sold our house (my wife is also my co-founder). Not everyone can, or is mad enough, to commit resources at that early stage. To be honest we were quite mad.
Prior to starting product development with Factor House we ran a consultancy that delivered systems for enterprise customers based on Kafka, Storm, Cassandra, etc - so we had plenty of experience. We also had consultancy customers who were eager to use the pre-commercial versions of our product and provide feedback.
I also run a meetup[2] in my hometown that specialises in programming solutions with distributed systems.
Last year we took a small amount of funding from Lighter Capital (non-dilutive, fairly simple loan terms) to unlock some growth.
Bootstrapping is hard, but my interactions with VC left me with the impression that it's a low-information lottery for the benefit of those who already have capital.
It seemed clear that if we took funding we would rapidly lose control of our vision and we don't need to 100x our business to achieve our goals. I would rather focus on delivery for our users and avoid adopting manic ideas to pay off 99 failed lottery tickets.