The book Nomadland covers the roaming vanlife pre 2017 that was supplying a lot of seasonal workers to Amazon warehouses, forest service employees and farm workers. (recruiters for all those places targeted people living vanlife who could move and live close to the place of work.) There are several streets I commuted on in the peninsula area of San Jose/San Francisco where all of the parking is used by people living in cars and RVs since 2005 at least.
I have not watched the movie but read reviews - they fictionalized and combined different aspects to make it filmable. The real writer embedded herself in vanlife for years and met a lot of different people across the USA who were living vanlife for one reason or another, so instead of focusing on one person's life per the movie as I understand it, the book spends time with different people for months, the audiobook was about ten hours with people and background stories about people and situations which might give a more comprehensive overview of what was happening at that time and now.
