One of my responsibilities to my family (I’m in my mid 40s) is to make sure that we are all fed and have a roof over our head. If that means taking time to keep up with the $cool_kids and stay employable so be it.
If you look at my resume over the past 10 years and the tech I’ve used, it’s indistinguishable from younger developers.
To a certain extent you also just need to be aware of where you are and where the market is going. You don't need to keep up with every single new technology, you just need an idea of where you fit in the current market and what skills you will need to pick up if / when you go to switch jobs.
You need to pick up the skills before you switch jobs because othet people will already know it and be able to hit the ground running. I’m already asking for above median salaries (not talking about FAANG salaries), I need to show a level of architectural efficiency. Meaning no, I am not going to study leetCode and I’ll probably laugh if you ask me to invert a binary tree, but I will draw out and discuss a well design architecture and software development process and answer questions that show I have proficiency at the technologies I claim to know.
If you look at my resume over the past 10 years and the tech I’ve used, it’s indistinguishable from younger developers.