I agree with your take on this. I am glad that I took maths and applied maths at uni, because that's been of tremendous help to me during my career as a programmer.
But nothing I learned at uni about programming or computer science has been of any use whatsoever.
Everything I know about coding I learnt either from reading other people's source code or long hours of experimentation. The rest is just experience and reading books.
Also, I devote part of every day to reading up on new or old coding practices/techniques, and I read a book a month about something to do with design, engineering or coding. If I didn't do this, I wouldn't stay current, and I wouldn't have a broad pool of knowledge to draw from.
The big question of a degree vs a diploma becomes irrelevant after a few years, something neither recruiters nor employers seem to realise.
For an accountant you need a degree, because the rules and practices of accounting are well-known and you can learn them all in a degree. This is not the case AT ALL for the ever-evolving field of programming, never mind the misunderstood field of computer science.