This article and discussion does show, in a pretty stark way, the options and demands of very different career paths for a software developer.
One option is to become a programmer for hire. You keep your skills up, and those skills are as much about getting a job as doing the job. You re-study data structures and algorithms. You can permute sets, find matching subtrees in binary search trees, and answer questions about how addresses in web browsers are resolve to web sites. You learn java, then GWT, then EJB, then spring, then struts, then you add a 2 to the end of struts, then Rails or Django, then you give it all up and do it again in Javascript, React, Vue, Ember. You also play the agile "estimate roulette" as you write down tasks and expected completion times in JIRA, and are asked about deadlines every morning in an almost inevitable corruption of the original methodology[1].
You would never do this for your own project. If you had an exciting new idea, the last thing you would do is go off and learn to find all subsets of a larger set that, when concatenated, form a member or the larger set, at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes. It's also fairly unlikely that you'd set out to write an SPA for many business ideas. But you'd definitely be doing this if you were applying for the next job, which you sort of always are doing, if you're a programmer for money. Even if you aren't looking to change jobs, you still do this, by and large.
Or, you can become the kind of programmer who creates a product, chooses the right tool for the task, and makes it work. The reason that this is difficult is that these jobs are rare. To really have this option, you often need to make the leap into doing your own thing.
That sort of entrepreneurial skill and mind-set seems to be orthogonal to most programmers. I couldn't tell you if it's innate or learned, but I do know that it's a big leap, involves risk, requires a period of economic uncertainty that is tough for people with dependents (or people just trying to pay rent and make it through the next few months in an expensive city). But it may be the best way out of the programmer-for-money quagmire.
The thing is, if you have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit... well I'm not sure you really need to be a programmer at all, there are all kinds of great opportunities out there.
[1] Yes, this is a bad case. Not a worst case, but a pretty bad one. I'd say all programmers for money have gone through some version of this more than once, but I'm putting them all together into something that is more grim than most have to put up with.