Do you know anyone who won their first orchestral job after 30? I'm not talking about moving from one orchestra to another, or even part-time to full-time. I mean first successful orchestreal audition ever over the age of 30. I've been wracking my brain and I just can't think of any.
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"I'm not talking about moving from one orchestra to another, or even part-time to full-time."
The bolded here really carries a lot of weight in validating your implied notion that this is rare/not possible. Working your way up the ladder is the way of the game for most people. If you want to jump right to comfortable, upper-middle class, stable life in the city of your choice, you chose the wrong field.
The different audition standards at different levels of orchestra are significant. If you're getting close at auditions, don't take that to mean you can get too picky. It's better to get on the ladder with a more attainable gig first, so that you can get paid to gain experience and continue honing your craft. There are a LOT of people who win great jobs beyond the age of 30, 40, or 50. Most of them spent some time in the Podunk Symphony Orchestra in order to get there.
It is fully possible to win an audition well over the age of 30, but you've gotta be playing all the time to be in shape, and you need to be able to dedicate lots of time to practice. We get this faulty impression of a specific timeline when kids win jobs right out of school, but they have the privilege of living off student loans (or the bank of Mom and Dad) and playing all the time in school. By contrast, if you're an independent adult working a normal job to pay the bills, it becomes very difficult to have the energy and mental bandwidth to adequately prepare for an audition in your off-hours after full days of work.
The straightforward way to work fewer hours, while honing your craft, is to win a part-time gig. Then you can reduce your non-music workload and have more time to commit to practicing. Use freelance income to buy yourself more time to practice by quitting your day job, even if it means reducing your total annual earnings. All else equal, someone living frugally making $30k a year freelancing, with no day-job, has a much better chance to win their next audition than someone making $60k with a time-consuming day job who plays some gigs on the side.
There is no finish line in this career, there's nowhere you're "supposed" to be at by a specific age. But you can't fool yourself about whether you're actually making forward progress, or just stagnating and praying for a miracle to drop a career in your lap. This line of thinking is totally a meme at this point but I'll say it anyway: at any given audition there are maybe a dozen people qualified to play the gig. Your job is to be one of those dozen. If you're auditioning regularly and consistently not advancing, that is pretty direct evidence that you're not playing well enough for the kinds of gigs you're auditioning for. If that's the case, you need to be practicing harder/better, getting more expert feedback about your playing, and taking more attainable auditions. If you are advancing sometimes, you're doing some things right, but you've gotta keep going - do not get complacent, do not let your foot off the gas. Being great at this will never stop being hard work.
Some sacrifices are necessary to make this career work. Most people who are smart, hard-working, and competent enough to "make it" as performing musicians could have made much more money in another field if they so chose. If that level of material comfort is your preference, feel free to choose another career. There are a LOT more musicians in the world making decent, middle-class livings than there are living the kinds of wealthy lives that social media and reality TV make us take for granted these days. Comparison is the thief of joy.
If you're response to many of these costs/downsides is: "but that sounds ******, I don't want to have to do that," then feel free to go live the kind of life you do want. Your sunk costs do not matter. There is no timeline, there is no finish line, no matter your path in life. If you wish you were living the life of a lawyer or a doctor or a software engineer, you can start now. If, on the other hand, you want this career enough to be okay with working harder, making less money than you dreamed of, and moving across the country to a place you don't really love, then do what you have to do to get on the ladder.