Yes

Why? Have you had three children yet? If so, you’ve reached peak human, just enjoy yourself.

Two words: growth mindset.

>But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Good, you still have your soul. Listen to it. All these arseholes want is their machines of loving grace that never say no, and orchestrate the masses for them. Self-driving to shape how/where/when people can move.

Build things for you and let the rest languish. Maybe share what you learn with aspiring juniors, and become the eccentric techie. The moral backbone is so lacking right now, I feel absolutely no motivation to extend the industry's grasp. My humble opinion.

> But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Leaving certainly won't help anything. Find companies and people that align with your values and build with them.

Or become a woodworker :)

I would say that Go is the best gateway into compiled languages. It is simple(it has very little syntactic sugar), has a ton of available libraries, comes with its own compiler, compiles in 1-2 seconds, has world class support for concurrency, is garbage collected so you do not have to manually manage the memory and therefore it will not feel too strange coming from JS, the standard library is batteries-included, a ton of online content to help out with learning and solving problems... overall the best developer experience as the ecosystem is top notch.

After you learn about pointers, different style of OOP, etc.. you can switch to something with manual memory management like Odin, Zig or Rust.

I would say, try Go for six months, then, if you want, move to one of the other languages. In a year, your career might be completely transformed and many new avenues will become available to you. THEN you can start thinking about what you'd like to do.

Would you need to go back to school or spend a lot of time, necessarily, to switch gears?

…or do you pick things up relatively quickly?

How do you feel about being responsible for your own thing?

> It pays pretty well ... I crave more purpose in life but understand the most rational choice is to keep going and saving for retirement.

"A bird in hand is always worth two in the bush" when it comes to Finances in today's uncertain world.

However, "Purpose in Life" != "Job Needs"; Disambiguate them in your head and pursue/manage each separately. Learn/Study whatever you find interesting and want to do. Whether you decide to make it a job to make money out of is a separate decision.

> Does it make sense to change direction at this point?

It may or may-not based on your financial/family situation and appetite for risk.

> I envy PhDs working on self-driving cars and rockets and AI.

Change that envy to inspiration so that you can study any of the above or other subjects that you find interesting. You can orient this towards getting a more satisfying job in the domain that you love or just do it for the intellectual enjoyment.

> But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Don't go there unless you want to change everything about your life.

PS: Study Philosophy both the ideal and pragmatic kind.