This has probably been asked before here - but how does a developer leave a day job to start working freelance full time?

I've worked on projects in my own time on and off during the short 4 or 5 years of my career so far and I've always considered doing it, but how do people make that jump? How do you start working for yourself and how do you secure clients?

A few days ago I took some time off at short notice to help someone close to me with their medical condition.
On the same day the CEO of the company made a request that only I could've fulfilled out of 12 devs so yesterday I was reprimanded for it.
Why don't companies do something to actively increase the bus factor on projects?

I was working under the title of mid-level developer when I felt I was clearly still a junior and was tasked with making changes to the core search functionality of the company website. After it was 'reviewed' by 3 people more senior than I and merged to production it took the majority of the site down.

I got the blame and the reviewers weren't even questioned 😒

Deploying a full test strategy across the company's range of php products because you haven't been scheduled to do anything else and the company has no automated testing after 10 years of functioning.

When you end up running support queries and QA as a developer because the client's on site support team blame the provider instead of their half-assed user configuration job. #IHopeYouGetFiredAssholes

When as a php dev you work in an office on projects with .net devs that have to interact and you don't know c/c# and they don't know php so all code snippets shared between you are in python. 🙃

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

Programming is a lot like playing video games. It challenges you to beat quests/tasks and hunt enemy bugs while providing boss levels in the form of large projects with tight deadlines and project managers who like to move the goal posts.