Agreed overall--I find that there's a real lack of appreciation of the sort of structural, high-level knowledge that I (at least) learned while getting a CS degree. And not a particularly good one, either, just something at a middling state school.

Just being able to look at a problem and go "hey, this is pretty simple graph traversal, I know the rules for this" has saved my bacon. Or the type theory that I picked up along the way that made type-heavy programming in Scala and Rust make sense. Or the set theory (math, but required for my CS degree, so I count it) that does bounce through my brain when I'm thinking about databases. Or even, like--"hmm, I think I can bang out a quick and dirty parser," and knowing what that parser should look like because I've studied how programming languages work and I get that for free.

I'm not the best programmer ever to walk the earth by a long shot, but I'm pretty good, and I'm pretty good because I can approach problems both bottom-up and top-down. Couldn't do both, flexibly, without a strong academic background.