I was going to ask if it seemed to have overlap with this article. Then I noticed the author of the article is the one that gave the talk, so I'm taking that as a yes.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Tbf he's also suggesting that Ruby is the most dev friendly language he could use, so I'm already a bit skeptical lol

As someone with a Bachelors degree in (Pure) Mathematics from a state university, I'll comfortably say that it hasn't caused any problems for me in my 10+ full stack/data engineer career, and I've never gotten any impression that a Masters would've made things better.

Compiler work might be different, but I'd suspect not.

As for networking opportunities... Not really. You'll be networking with people with 0 years in professional dev work, mostly in a academia. They aren't contacts that will benefit you.