Health insurance that's tied to your employer is such a toxic pattern in the US, and it's so expensive to escape. I pay something like $550 a month because I'm not tied to a company and I'm young and healthy.
I have a few friends who have moved to a contracting model within the hardware world and haven't gone back to W2. I think they've had some issues with managing workloads, because they'll typically have multiple overlapping clients who have no awareness of each other, so occasionally I hear about someone being booked solid for a month or something like that when busy phases overlap. Balanced sometimes by 10 hour weeks.
I have a few friends who have moved to a contracting model within the hardware world and haven't gone back to W2. I think they've had some issues with managing workloads, because they'll typically have multiple overlapping clients who have no awareness of each other, so occasionally I hear about someone being booked solid for a month or something like that when busy phases overlap. Balanced sometimes by 10 hour weeks.