You can find good contract on Upwork, but you need to go through lots of bad ones. I find around 5 good contracts there per year. I find that even when a client agrees on a rate, Upwork has the reputation of finding inexpensive workers, and you will get many clients trying to pay you less.

I'm also a bit tired of running into people that are 'starting a contracting firm' and have 0 clients or direction yet and just want to waste your time.

Really! That could make for some really interesting stories. Fascinating to think of LLMs as a customer acquisition pipeline for developers.

I've snagged at least one of them.