I think there's definitely a way to accomplish the "book learning" parts of that experience without giving up a social life. I find I don't learn appreciably slower now than I did then - the social life seems to come out of the Reddit/HackerNews time budget, which is fairly low signal-to-noise ratio anyway.

I don't think I could've accomplished the self learning part though. Even if I learned just as much, there'd still be the nagging question of "Could I have learned more? Could I have accomplished more?" And I wouldn't have the experience necessary to judge what's really important to me, and what tradeoffs I want to make with the rest of my life.