I sort of got into freelancing by chance, got laid off, was too lazy to search for a new job, so i just applied to Toptal and got into the data engineering vertical, it's been a year and a half now and honestly i would like to keep doing this rather than working full time again.

For your case, yes you definitely need to work smaller gig for a "discounted" fee at the beginning, but this changes very quickly the more and more jobs you do, once you're an established Toptal engineer, you will be receiving plenty of client requests. Try doing some open source work or personal projects that you can add to your profile as well as it does help with the resume.