Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.

Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.

Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.

If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.

Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.

He perfected the hiring game, probably automated fake activity on his GitHub, lied on his resume, among other things: https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/

He was good at the office politics kabuki. Wore the right masks and all.