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Agreed. Of the many things I've learned over the years, two related ones are:

if the work you're doing is work that you're genuinely interested in, you have a huge immediate advantage, and

Running into where crowd is running out, and running out of where the crowd is running in usually (but not always) gives you a large advantage.

Yeah what most companies are even thinking about right now is prompt engineering which doesn’t require an advanced degree.

Actually developing models is a much smaller field (in terms of jobs) and the overlap with software engineering is small. I’m sure you can make a lot of money in it, but you’re better off coming at it from data science.

You assume that "branding yourself as an expert" is the same as "becoming an expert".

My read of his comment is the opposite of that.