I've seen others say that linear algebra is a prerequisite of any kind of maths maturity goal.

I think, personally, maths is an incredibly important field and there's a feeling that some degree of comfort with it will help me in more ways than I can imagine. That is, however, an opinion formulate after some self study based on a great interest in the field.

It fascinates me that even things we take for granted, such as addition and multiplication, has entire subfields that have generalised the structure of those operations over those types of sets (in what's taken for granted: addition and multiplication over the set of integers). What's even more fascinating is that this work has had an impact on other areas of deep interest e.g category theory and Haskell.

And yes I agree. It is glorious that the binary operations that seemed so natural to us formed the basis for groups, rings, and fields. Associativity, commutativity, distributivity of two related operations are quite the pearls :-) Its also interesting as a programmer and from a "properties of functions" perspective to study magmas and semigroups and groupoids..etc..

Knowing more about abstract algebra in terms of special properties of functions has led me to believe that most programmers are missing out on some of the beauty of functions by merely implementing them and not so much understanding the common properties and classifications of them.