Seems downvoted, but test roles are a legitimate alternative. It is not more/less work, but is a change of pace from dev/eng roles.

Test positions vary. QA might mean tedious manual testing, or it might not. What you'd probably want is a software developer in test (SDT) position.

This is maybe a rare good experience, but I was a software developer in test (SDT) early in my career, and enjoyed it. The salary bands were the same as dev positions at that particular company. I wrote test strategies and automated everything: end-to-end tests, CI pipelines, performance tests, etc. I gave a few internal talks, switched teams/projects frequently (once per year), and met whole bunch of people.

A big difference for me between QA/SDT and Dev/Eng is I could be more passive. I didn't run meetings and had less responsibility for the project. I never talked to a customer once, although you need a sense of what they want. If my tests weren't 100% finished/passing, the thing is still put in front of users anyway. When you find bugs, the fixes are prioritized against everything else (i.e. non urgent). Usually I wasn't finding major issues anyway, but working on regression tests to ensure most things are basically working from release to release.

YMMV. It's still a lot of work, but different. If you're a competent dev, you'll stand out easily as an SDT.

All the stress, less prestige, less political weight, less pay, less praise.

Nah.

God no. constantly repeating the same thing over and over, looking for someone else's failures.

I've thought about this. I wasn't quite sure about the salary bands for QA. Do you happen to know what remote QA pay ranges are?

If he's burnt-out from being a developer, QA will just add fuel to the fire. I feel they the most under paid and overexploited and time pressured of any role adjacent to software development and dedicated QA jobs are going extinct anyway.