I have seen this happen several times. Some, not all, programmers and IT professionals are nerds as you describe them. In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by.

Startups seem to have more of these types and big companies, fortune 500 sized seem to have almost none.

As for how it betters oneself to learn, you cannot know until you learn it. The new tech exists because someone tried to solve the problems of the past, sometimes it works. You can't know the benefits of object oriented or functional programming if you are still writing the same cobol you did in the past or for a more modern analogy you will need to stand up more apache servers to get the same throughout if you have never learned about nginx.