I was a self-taught software developer who already made money with programming for ~10 years before I took my first computer science classes.

Those classes unlocked a whole new level of programming for me. I just didn't know what I didn't know before.

People keep reinventing the same shit if they haven't learned about it before.

Sure, you can learn many things online. But for most things you just don't even know that they exist, you wouldn't know to search for them.