I was in the same research lab as the author, but from a different school (BU). When I found out that most of my peers were also doing their master's part time while working, I wished I could do that. But as an international student, there are a lot of restrictions. I had to do it full time (3-4 classes per semester), and I could only work 20 hours part time on campus, usually as a TA and/or research assistant. I did 3 jobs to max that out since most jobs only required you to work 6-8 hours a week. I could only do one internship for my entire degree. My total cost for 2 years was $117,889. BU did not have scholarships or aid for international students, because saying you need aid is admitting that you lied on the visa application. Then I had to pay $7800 to work on my thesis over the summer, which I chose not to finish because I wanted to start working earlier. To make up for lack of work experience, I pretty much did open source contribs 40 hours a week while working on my thesis and TAing. There was a period of 10 weeks where I was putting in 80-100 hours between school and unpaid work.
It was still worth it in the end. Similar experience coming from no CS undergrad. There were about 3 good classes that were very valuable, like Algorithms, Cloud Computing, and Embedded Systems. The rest was not that great, especially with remote. When I think about ROI compared to a bootcamp, it's a tough one. Really successful bootcamp grads are already self-selecting going into the bootcamp, same with the really smart students in my master's program. But going to a master's program seems to have a better ROI just based on quality of instruction/institution alone.
6 months after graduation and my pay bump has more than covered it. I was feeding the master's program cash cow, so I think of it as I'm helping fund my US and green card classmates' master's. Most of my peers had 50% or full ride scholarships.