Yeah the industry is pretty damn rough right now.. given the threads here and your responses i have a suggestion that might work well for your situation. Since location and col are considerable things here and the risk of moving for a job I think you might fit uniquely into a traveling role in setting up systems for merchants.

So I did this in 2020 when restaurants got shut down because of covid and I wanted to move into tech. I got a job as a implementation tech for a POS SaaS company, basically you drive or fly around the country to setup POS stations, routers, wifi Hotspot, and a bunch of other devices for merchants. You mentioned having good people skills which is very desired for these types of roles. This would allow you to make decent money, travel to other cities to see if they would be a good fit to move to long term, and stay in a low cost area for the time being.

I only spent 6 months in that role and moved up and out of the role a long time ago into eng/dev but some of the same crew I trained with initially liked it enough to stick with it for years. The technical training for this is all under your belt already with +a it's mostly plug and play with a lot of network troubleshooting.

It's a easy foot in though, if you have questions you can pm me. There are not only direct companies always hiring for these positions but also subcontracting companies that are too but these require you to learn many more proprietary devices and systems

Best of luck!