if you decide you want an accredited university degree, then you can get FAFSA to fund community college, then transfer an online university such as Florida
I think the negative picture painted by the author masks that the company is placing 50% of graduates which mostly paid nothing for the education they received. Lambda is not high quality education, but its super cheap and higher quality than just reading a Knuth Book, or Skenna's algo book which has no completion rate.
Either way, you are not becoming a true machine learning researcher via self-study nor a bootcamp. You will need at least a master's in CS/Math/Stats to land those roles. A bootcamp is neither the lowest cost to a softwaredev career nor is it the a career effective maximizing choice.