Hardly. The only people who care about your GitHub are technical people. Most of the gatekeepers at any decent size company are not going to care one bit about GitHub, but they will recognize the degree. By the time you get to the hiring manager the degree doesn't matter. It's getting to that level that's the obstacle.

And frankly, when you have more experience, GitHub is also useless, because your network matters 1000x more than your portfolio.

There are still a lot of jobs unfortunately that won't even look at your impressive github account if you don't have a degree.

I built my career for 10 years without a degree. It is doable. But having a degree (got it at 32) made life A LOT easier.

The first people to look at your CV probably don't know what Github is.

The degree is a checkbox for recruiters/HR who are looking to match a job spec before passing you onto the engineering team.