Nope. Giving terrible advice, couching it in "my unpopular opinion", then backpedaling through "maybe this could work for you, who knows" is lazy writing and lazier thinking.
I have two real-world examples where this notion played out spectacularly:
- An ex-gf took an unpaid internship at the main museum here in San Diego with minimal job prospects upon graduating from USCD with a BA in history. 6 months later she took a full-time position at that museum, beating out someone with a MFA from Stanford simply because she was exposed to so many influential people in the industry who vouched for her. A year after that shee was promoted to managing their event planning dept.
- I transitioned from C# to Rails work by doing a pro-bono project for 4 months @ ~20hrs/week, the main condition was that they paid for a Sr. dev for mentorship. My mentor on that project continued to bring me work following that project, so much so that I quit my day job.
Value can be many things. Money is just one of them.
1) It's an avenue for exploitation- if you did x for free for person A why won't you do y free for person B? What if this overtakes the time you need for your day job, which pays you and in turn enables you to work for free at your other gig?
2) It devalues the actual cost of labor. Why pay someone to build this when I can "pay someone with experience"? This complaint pops up a lot in graphic design work as well.
This isn't to say "don't do side projects" or "don't do open source"- with the latter, it's something you're doing for a community rather than one entity for a business intent. But it's reasonable to be cautious when someone says "we need a website that's like Uber for X for $0".
Again, I must restate, value comes in many forms. Money is simply one. In these situations you truly aren't working for 'free'.
The main thing is to put limits and goals on such activities. My ex got into an industry where unpaid interns were a common thing and it kickstarted her career. She did have to walk away briefly before they offered her a (low) paid position, and they she had to walk away once more before she got a FT position. This wasn't going to happen any other way, and she absolutely flourished.
The client I worked for didn't pay for my time but they paid for the time of my mentor. I specifically had 4 months @ 20 hrs. per week, they paid him 5 hours per week - this was detailed in the contract. I had no experience in Rails at the time and I sure as heck didn't want to fail at my first time at bat. It was worth it to me to take something like that on vs. a low rate without that assistance.
But yes, if you're just getting started in software as a college student and taking an internship, of course you should be compensated as fairly as possible, because that in common in that context - if you don't, you are being exploited. Totally different thing.
My wife got a Bachelor's from UCLA, then a Master's in Museum Studies from University College, London. She then worked for free (it was called "interning" - which is kind of crazy for someone with a master's) at the San Diego Air and Space Museum (some kinda weird folks there...), and the USS Midway. She gave up weekends and time she could have spent earning an income. It amounted to nothing, though she did get a neat volunteer dinner from the Air and Space Museum. Now she has a normal job in a normal office because she has to pay off the debts from school and can't afford to work for free.
Anyway, your anecdote is valid, but so is mine.
Also, I totally understand the whole "why in the world would you pay for that" but if you work in tech you're in a fairly privileged position. The thing I desperately wanted to do most of my life happens to pay well. Somebody else desperately wanted to work in museums/heritage/archaeology and share knowledge. And museums do good work - one of the projects she worked on was repatriating artifacts stolen from Native American graves in the early 20th century. Since the thieves generally didn't take good notes, it could require a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to determine an artifact's provenience. That was more related to her undergrad studies - the graduate degree was more about a mix of preservation, conservation, etc.
I'm not sure it's worse than making some F2P game or Tinder for dogs. But it's definitely less profitable.