I've spent large chunks of my career in the Midwest as a consultant. Senior devs go into very long term consulting gigs because then companies can afford to pay us much more: we count as 100% capex.

Companies that might pay an employee $110K a year will have zero problem paying rates that end up with take-homes of +$200K a year after paying your own benefits and taking vacation time off.

Could you expand on that? I've snubbed contracting gigs in the past because I enjoy the often very generous healthcare plans at tech companies.

Actually, assuming you're not just maintaining a code base (i.e. you're mostly adding features or making something new), the cost of software development is typically an asset on the balance sheet