Me as well! I've started working at startups as an employee about ~6 years ago.
And did my first freelance project about 3 years ago. Mostly doing FullStack with a FE focus. From then I've been working on and off due to studies.
It certainly has its upsides and downsides. Here in Germany, freelancing allows one to somewhat escape generally low salary for employed software developers (as compared to the US). But what I don't enjoy is the distance to the actual issue/customer at hand. It's on average a much more corporate form of work.
And the last couple months have been very slow in terms of demand.
Just today I used ChatGPT to help me speed up writing somewhat trivial C Code for a project in an embedded systems class.
Prompt: "Generate a tiny PID controller with only a Proportional factor written in C. That takes a rotational input from -360 to 360 degrees. The setpoint in degrees. And returns a motor speed in the range of -255 to 255."
=> Produced a compiling correct result.
Later I wanted to know how to communicate between my kernel module and user space program:
Prompt: "How do I get a value via character device from my kernel module into my user space c programm?" gave a bunch of answers and digging deeper with Prompt: "Could you provide me with an example of the user space program" gave a compiling and correct answer again.
I could have written all of that myself while spending a good amount researching on google. But this way I felt less frustrated and was definitively a lot quicker.
Not the solution for everything but maybe for a C beginner where research can take a long time and often leads to more confusion than anything else. Now the question is if that confusion is critical in the learning process. And if so how critical and at what stages of the experience spectrum the most?