I think you're right, and I think it just comes down to Time. A lot of people sneer at traditional university CS degrees as being wasteless and unnecessary, but

I think you're right, and I think it just comes down to Time. A lot of people sneer at traditional university CS degrees as being wasteless and unnecessary, but that's one thing they do right; the combined total time of CS courses you take might rival the time spent in a 6 month intensive bootcamp, but its spread out over more Time. People need Time to understand abstraction. Most engineers start with the abstraction ("how do I write an API in Node") then work their way down when problems arise ("wait, why is my app slow? what's an event loop?"), but if all you have is the 6 months you simply aren't going to get very deep. Then you're on the job, while simultaneously adulting (if you weren't already adulting during the bootcamp). So you're set up to evolve at a much slower rate than your coworkers because you're missing fundamental understanding of the lower levels of abstraction and how they fit together. I really think it comes down to having two classes of software engineer, just like electricians vs electrical engineers and nurses vs doctors. Each role has a very important place in our modern economy, and you can make a blue collar living in the more easily accessible ones. But you simply can't replace deep domain knowledge of low-level abstractions, nor the many specialized fields in CS like performance engineering, authentication/authorization, machine learning, cloud engineering/infrastructure, etc.