You don't need to be hired by a company to make money using Solidity for smart contracts - you can just build something yourself (or with some random person you met on Discord or Twitter with a food pfp) and make money. Many of those people are doing it without being tied to real life identity. That's like.. part of the big appeal of blockchains - disintermediating middlemen, companies, etc. I don't know that many companies hiring Solidity devs, although there are major companies like Microsoft or EY and such, dabbling in smart contracts and contributing to Ethereum ecosystem like with zk-proof stuff