Yeah, everybody wants freedom and flexibility from self-employment, but that's generally speaking not a realistic attainable goal. The most defensible small businesses are ones that are sweaty i.e. require a lot hard work and hours others just wont justify doing, and that's an extremely important facet because without employees its much easier for a business to catastrophically collapse. Pretty much by definition anything that requires low effort is easy to clone and thus become saturated.

Small business self-employment doesn’t care that much about saturation, I think, only the supply-demand relationship. See everything from Fiverr to coffee shops.

But yes, self-employment often is a lot of work.