Transitioning from WordPress to JavaScript Engineer — Tips?

I've been in the WordPress space for quite a while, both on the backend with PHP, and on the frontend with themes — but have always been working with JavaScript. Over the years, I've found it very appealing and I love the language.

So much, in fact, that I want to switch stacks and jump headfirst into something like React (or Vue) and Node.js (not to mention there's a very nice pay-raise there, something I'm tired of not seeing in the WordPress community).

The problem, however, is that I have no React experience.

Obviously, side-projects are something I'm working on to showcase that talent — but a lot of companies want enterprise-level experience before hiring React developers.

What's the best suggestion you would have to getting a React job that pays market rate (I'm looking for between 85-95k), when what I have is about 4+ years of WordPress and vanilla JS experience?

Is that an unrealistic goal to do in one step?