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I'm pretty far ahead of the game and can adjust my approach if things don't go my way early on. Part of my approach is to have a lot of low risk liquid capital sitting to carry me through a major downturn until the ship is righted.

I'm on your side. I think a 12% withdrawal rate if applied selectively is very doable, as long as you can avoid selling investments at the wrong time, and I think if you look at the year by year historical returns of the S&P 500 at sites like this: LINK you can clearly see that there are plenty of opportunities to take sufficient profits to keep enough cash to get through the down times. Single digit positive returns are actually somewhat rare for the S&P 500. Most positive year returns are actually double digit and there have been a lot more positive return years than negative return years, and you can figure out all kinds angles on how long downturns last.

Unfortunately there isn't a lot of easily accessible data for other indexes, but at least in the case of the S&P 500 I would like to be able to compare it to Large Value and Small Value, because when we look at most the bad years in recent history, Value lagged going into the corrections and popped coming out. At the end of market cycles, before corrections, the S&P 500 is usually skewed towards high PE growth stocks, certainly the case now.

The leveraged funds you mention are a different animal, but I really think that if you were really strong in technical analysis you could make a lot of money off of leverage, especially if you could use a protective put option effectively to defend against downturns.

Anyway, just remember, large value, small value, and foreign value made it through the dot com sell off pretty good, SV and LV did good after Covid also, at least for me.