I was in a very similar situation about a year ago.
What changed is that I took freelance contracts, on stacks that I had tried to use in side projects but failed to ship because of analysis paralysis. The simple fact that the project is not yours to drive, that income is ensured and that there are not many ties (less than an actual job) was an ideal framework for polishing my skills on some parts of the stack (React and general front-end design).
After that, going back to side projects felt much easier, some decisions which would have triggered anxiety attacks before seemed more obvious.
If you can't/don't want to go the freelance way, it may work with other work organisation ways, as long as you're not the (only) one who has to make the non-technical decisions, so you can focus on gaining experience dealing with the technical part of problem solving.
Doing freelance gigs is a good option to pick up new skills. If you can hit the ground running and cope up with the stress of learning and delivering at the same time, go for it.
Side note: I got into Python, and web scraping in particular, by picking up few freelance scraping gigs. Learned a lot in few days and this sparked my interest in Python.
What changed is that I took freelance contracts, on stacks that I had tried to use in side projects but failed to ship because of analysis paralysis. The simple fact that the project is not yours to drive, that income is ensured and that there are not many ties (less than an actual job) was an ideal framework for polishing my skills on some parts of the stack (React and general front-end design).
After that, going back to side projects felt much easier, some decisions which would have triggered anxiety attacks before seemed more obvious.
If you can't/don't want to go the freelance way, it may work with other work organisation ways, as long as you're not the (only) one who has to make the non-technical decisions, so you can focus on gaining experience dealing with the technical part of problem solving.