Remove the draconian anti-landlord legislation and I think you could see a return of many landlords and SFR's in particular.  11000 landlords quit Seattle in 2022, this is the number that has not renewed their rental registration.

Or would that be a futile task?

I do not know where in California you live, but filling 11 vacancies at the same time seems like a pretty daunting task. 

You could just focus on maintenance, but that is only one of many tasks that a short term rental must manage.

I've created a daily schedule and habit tracker that fully aligns my daily habits and tasks with my longer term goals.

You'll probably get exhausted with this so you need a PM who serves at the ground level so you can focus on higher value tasks. 

You definitely want a "like-minded" individual but you don't want that person to do the same tasks as you or its all just a big waste of time.

I don't know how low it goes but my spidy-sense is it's a double task-action, and one of those is to generate a "crisis" to allow the "savior" to come forward.

Some localities have anti 3x laws ( Cook county Illinois?

Some people are trying to save $10k on the project but it cost them 2 or 3 months and they have a lot of time on task, and a lot of personal overseeing.