Something missed in the article and most of the comments is the degree (or certification) provides a broad roadmap of, at least in theory, the entire topic.
I spent several years doing BGP and related router support; when I passed my CCNP I was forced to learn a lot of interesting broad topics ranging from multicasting to obscure details of low level packet switching.
When I was very young in the 80s and introduced to 1st edition K+R C I was unimpressed with pointers; why bother with all this? Later, I found pointers pretty interesting and useful for data structures and low level driver "stuff".
This is hardly a problem solely for CS. Philosophy has the same issue. Self taught philosopher almost certainly means maybe one favorite author and maybe one book named something like "The philosophy of (insert pop culture movie title here)" and little more. Even a pretty lame intro to philosophy class will be much more broad.
An enforced broad education of a topic can be very useful. That seems to generally be missing in online education. A lot of effort over the years has been put into very tiny topics like "how to teach kids the derivative of x to the y power" but very little effort seems to be put into "how to decide what is learning enough of calculus, how to measure it, and how to pinpoint lacking areas"