Matt Damon as the protagonist of Good Will Hunting: "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
That wasn't true before the pandemic but without in-person classes it is absolutely true.
By the time I started university, I'd been programming for 13 years, I'd done paid freelance development jobs, and written my first compiler, and I'd done more advanced stuff than the first several semesters worth of classes. I had gaps, and I filled them with the group work and books, but there was no value to me in the in-person lectures for the introductory computer science courses.
Yeah and you did pay some attention, got a sampler plate, makes sense.
Plus it's fun acing courses with no effort every once in a while. It's a good sign.
It was also not about enjoying acing courses, but about needing to take courses that were compulsory for the programme and that you could not test out of. As I said, the option to skip most lectures felt like a reasonable middle group - if I'd run into problems with the group sessions, I could have easily gone back to the lectures at any time.
I got to save plenty of time by opting out of most of the lectures, but the groups and projects gave you feedback if you started skipping too much (something I learned in the introductory maths course that I also first thought I could get away with not going to every lecture for) and forced you to read at least the main set books so you got a good idea of whether it was material you understood.
It's indeed easy to think you know more than you do, but at the same time, sometimes you do know exactly what you know - been in both situations.