I plan to eventually complete most of the materials, but I take huge, sometimes multi-year detours. I've done SICP and nand2tetris books, it took around a year each (not fulltime obviously, also I went a bit harder on 2nd half of the nand like writing unit tests and building AST for the compiler instead of the easier approach suggested in the book). Then I decided I wanted to go do OS, but before that to learn C to be able to implement my own stuff, so I also worked through K&R book.
On the other hand I'm pretty bad at doing "real world" things, full of edge cases and details, and try to avoid them as much as possible, so I may not be an example of someone getting value in a practical sense. I feel that I've grown better as a programmer but I can't say how much of it can be attributed to my home studies and how much just to the experience on the job itself.