DeFi projects can give you a good income as long as the price of Bitcoin increases and more investors join, they are in the jungle taking loans or investments and giving you profits from them, but things will change a lot when the prices start to fall and you may lose all your investments. Instead of investing in pools, it is better to buy a coin whose protocol supports POS and better than all of that, focus on investing in Bitcoin.
If trading is something he's also considering, I will advise OP to go into futures trading. Since he has some knowledges already it will be easy for him to understand the advantages of going on long and short trades and it won't take much of his time to really understand the process and inject some funds in it. The problem most people have with trading or crypto in general is the lack of patience to learn the basic and advanced skills in trading. The benefit with doing this remains that if he understands the trading carefully, he will still take benefits during bull or bear runs.
Though it generally comes with its risks, the gains that usually comes with futures trading particularly in leverages are oftentimes large. With your small capital, you can make huge amount of money using futures trading.