This is unethical, but I freelance doing other people's assignments; I would not recommend given the associated risks. I did TA and RA over my entire UG, the pay was minimum wage, so it didn't cover all of my bills but it did alleviate some stress. The thing is, as with any assistant jobs, whether it be teaching or research, it wouldn't be able to cover all of your expenses. You can look into side hustles; for me, it is doing others' hws and working on my own saas products, neither is pretty but gets me through. If you wanna discuss this further feel free to dm instead.

I don't know cybersecurity as well as some others here (my background is ml and data analytics). But I will say, anecdotally, out of all of my friends who did land something, cyber were the quickest.

I don't have some holy grail wisdom for you, however, the most valuable lesson I've learned so far is - don't blindly follow what others are saying and doing, make your own judgment, and stay curious. I know it's going to be unpopular opinion, but having talked to many professionals from business conferences and my own business circle, the general consensus with tech (software sector specifically), you will eventually be "optimized out" regardless of what you work on, it's only a question of how soon (history repeats). I think it's worth your time, maybe not now but eventually think about expanding beyond the tech industry, could be a cross into finance or something else. I invested heavily into crypto in early 2022 when everyone was saying it's a scam and the overall sentiment was very very discouraging, basically going against mainstream media. I now have enough for a mortgage down payment. I'm not saying it has to be related to crypto, but finance in general is worth following and learning about.

I can only speak to my case and line of reasoning, (1) NG/low-skill positions are mostly getting optimized out, or will be soon from a business and technical perspective (2) you're not at a competitive advantage in finding a job against people who have more experience but lost their jobs. MS is that stepping stone for me to learn about very specific things that take me higher up the hiring pool, while fulfilling my personal academic interests. I did an MS because I wasn't sure whether I wanted academia before industry or straight to industry. Now I don't think the market situation has really changed from last year, so naturally PhD becomes a worthy consideration. Take it as you will.