This seems like clickbait, but I do not want to label ideas prematurely.

I understand the point that the author is picking a pretty narrow window of potential benefits from Open Source software.

For me personally, having access to open-source software made it possible for me to learn and apply data analysis and visualization techniques when reasoning about incarceration data. I used the Seaborn Python library (open-source) to help me complete my final project and get my bachelor's degree. With education being a provable form of climbing the social ladder, and open-source software helping me, hopefully, the author can see the value for developers (who will likely go on to work at a company).