Fuck the Academy

I have strong opinions about grad school! My opinions are that it's shit unless you have basically a full scholarship and a lot of freedom to do whatever the fuck you want. Since you said it's expensive, I'm inclined to say "why not save your money and just go to the physical place of [school] and hang out with [field] people there and be helpful to them in creative and unconstrained ways?" I predict that that will get you more of what you want, at less cost, than taking the degree.

If you're the sort that has trouble doing stuff without structure (which seems highly unlikely given the amount of independent work you've been doing the last few years) then spend a small fraction of the money you would have spent on grad school hiring someone to sit next to you and keep you focused. Hell, that someone could even literally be someone else who was also considering grad school in a related topic, and the two of you could talk.

Anyway, I can't pass an ideological Turing test for imagining going to grad school in the first place, so I'm sure I'm missing some key elements of your perspective here, but seriously seriously I think it's a bad idea overdetermined like 10× over. Talk to me further if you find yourself leaning towards it. I would have hoped Ben Kuhn's piece [which he'd linked] would have been enough but apparently not?

See also this rant I wrote after I graduated undergrad: Unlearning Shoddy Thinking

It seems it would apply less to grad school, but see also... the replication crisis.