My own experience is that masters is for people who need to immigrate to the US for work and can afford a masters degree. When I was in school, the masters level CS students weren’t expected to know CS well going in, so it was kind of like cramming a full CS degree into a two year window… with not amazing results. Obviously that depends on the student. Also lots of students who just didn’t want to work professionally yet, and you can get student loans to keep working on a masters degree.
All that is to say I’m extremely surprised by the people saying the degree is valuable on the merits and not for some other instrumental reason.
P.S. regardless of education level, programming, at least in software companies, is an extremely privileged career regardless of pay. Hours, work environment, remote availability, treatment of labor by management are all better than I can imagine even comparably-paid trades positions, especially if you’ve already invested in the bachelors. I think people in the software engineering bubble can, sometimes, fail to appreciate how good they have it relative to others (especially if you get caught up comparing between FAANG or have ever complained about an equity package).