I'm grateful for all the academics/researchers who figure things so that we craftsmen don't have to. I can feel smart about having a basic understanding of Paxos, Hindley-Milner, Lambda calculus, etc. But there's no way I would have ever invented/discovered them, let alone prove their properties or formalise them.

We (in industry) only have the possibility of saying things like "don't bother with a degree, just do a bootcamp or teach yourself" because of all the heavy lifting that researchers have done.