I have solo freelanced for a little over a decade. The prior almost 30 years of my career was mostly spent in cubicle farms with other programmers. I started programming professionally (meaning I got paid to do it) in 1977, to give some context. I started programming for free, on my own and in school, in 1974.

One thing I learned early on, thanks to some good mentors and managers, was that expanding my interests and skills out of programming would improve my chances of surviving a layoff or getting made obsolete. The most recent incident, at my last full-time job at an educational software company, illustrates that. Most of the programmers I worked with limited themselves to a couple of programming languages, hated meetings, did not interact with marketing or sales or management except under duress. When the company's fortunes turned and they started laying people off, I survived. I actually asked the CEO (my two direct managers had been laid off) why more senior people had lost their jobs but I hadn't. He told me that I was the only programmer who had taken an interest in the business, could work with marketing people, and had expanded my skills when needed (I had to learn enough Lisp in a hurry to deal with a product the company bought and had to integrate, no one else volunteered).

I've had similar experiences in my career, and I attribute it to being that one person, or one of a small number of programmers, who took the opportunity to learn the business domain and contribute in ways beyond just writing code. I survived at another company that replaced a lot of in-house code with a Salesforce-like product, probably because I was one of the only people in the programming group who didn't crap all over and moan about the management decision (I actually pointed out that our backlog of technical debt evaporated when the company moved to a third-party solution).

I still write code most of the time, but my customers (most of whom I've had for 3 years or more, a couple for a decade) tell me they appreciate that I take an interest in their business and help them solve business problems, rather than just telling them that rewriting in Rust or whatever will solve everything, which most managers have heard (or tried to do) enough times by now to show some caution.