Even if the destination doesn't log GET components, there could be corporate proxies that MITM that might log the URL. Corporate proxies usually present an internally trusted certificate to the client.
Which are imo on the low end of U.S. tech salary. Considering a contractor also has overhead like healthcare, business expenses, any time spent in administration take home would potentially be lower.
The market is softer right now but will probably rebound in a couple years.
Running Steam (Windows) games on Linux (Fedora) has always been finicky for me. Sometimes requiring digging into logs to figure out what's going on