Full disclosure: I (as does almost everyone else here) have a stake in this as I will likely someday be a 50+ employee or job seeker.
P.s. I'm going to stop writing this, but the more I think about what you wrote the more infuriated I get. What the * is wrong with that recruiter? At the least they should be fired for expressing that thought, but they should also suffer in some way for having that thought. They have no business considering your age at all, especially with 50 being decade(s) below retirement age.
There are also limits to what I am capable of doing. I like to think I'm pretty good at the Ops side of the house, and I'm more than happy to work with Devs as part of a larger team, but I am not a Programmer or Developer. I can hack on code to a degree, but I simply do not have the capacity to develop code from scratch.
My wife and I have lived in Austin since 2006, and we are not willing to relocate in order for me to get a job. Since she is an international business lawyer who has always made at least twice what I have ever made (even comparing her worst year to my best), it just doesn't make financial sense for us to move.
So, I'm limited to jobs I can get here in Austin, or to work remotely. Austin being the town it is, there are lots of startups here, but they want devs and not ops. Or they want devs who can do everything.
There's also a number of big enterprise companies here, but of course they want Windows. The University isn't an option because I found out the hard way that they are the biggest flying Mongolian clusterfuck in town.
Sigh....
So your original comment was a bit disingenuous, you have a lot of conditions to where you'll work, but you then you also tried to use the "age discrimination in tech" narrative to garner sympathy (so I suppose). If there is age discrimination in tech (which I don't see myself, I see the opposite), then commentary like your original post don't help.
They have a business problem they need solved, and that almost surely means "come in, walk around, talk to people, and figure it out".
Since the layoff, I've been able to scrape together a few phone interviews, but I find that it is damn hard to get a second interview -- anywhere.
It's not just hard to get into this line of work at this age, it's also hard to get another job in this line of work when you have already been working in this industry for over 25 years.
The last time I was interviewing, one recruiter said to me that they were looking for someone who was just exactly like me -- but just five to ten years younger -- and asked me if I knew of anyone who was looking. I don't see how you can have as much experience as I did at this time, if you didn't start playing with computers back in 1982.