But at the same time as you, after working for 5 years, I started learning like crazy. Diving deeper in the .NET framework, learning functional programming, making home-brew projects that do web scraping, data analysis, even some web development. Then Docker and Kubernetes... 100s of online courses, books, without clear intention or objective progress. But it did not frustrate me at that time as I was having fun.

Only after 2-3 years of doing this I noticed that I know some things, that when I go to a job interview I know more than the person interviewing me (not always). The knowledge compounds.

If you have a deliberate goal go for it. But if you just go for things that peak your interest that seems to work as well. It did for me.

It happened a million times over, you have some brilliant idea, people start using it, and after a few months some big company puts 10-100 engineers on it and they do the same thing.

I would say that the key is to get to a big enough audience so they would rather buy you out than compete. Easier said than done :P

And the biggest question is: do you want to commit 100% of your time and money to building your company, or you would rather spend your time building new things?