This crowd may not want to hear this, but as a former mathematician, the DS/Algorithms knowledge I gleaned from Leetcode grinding has been far more useful in my day-to-day work than any of the category theory I once used on a regular basis.
I think learning the essentials of another field can be more valuable than expected, whether it's a mathematician learning to program or a software engineer learning patterns of abstraction. When you've gone deep on one field, going even deeper has diminishing returns.
Software engineers and (non-categorical) mathematicians are both forced to deal with patterns of abstraction on a regular basis, so they naturally pick up a lot of what category theory concerns itself with. This can make category theory sound like quite a lot of words for very little gain. But I do think that formalizing one's intuition -- taking something understood implicitly and giving it explicit form -- can be a useful tool in its own right.
Most of the material out there on category theory attempts to formalize the algebraist's intuition. Software engineers then have to learn algebra just to learn category theory. I don't think that's essential to category theory, and I think we're starting to see more and more "elementary" category theory that doesn't take some other whole edifice as given. The fact that so many software engineers exist who do find value in a categorical perspective (it's more than you'd expect!) suggests that we'll get there eventually.
