I was going to ask if it seemed to have overlap with this article. Then I noticed the author of the article is the one that gave the talk, so I'm taking that as a yes.
Tbf he's also suggesting that Ruby is the most dev friendly language he could use, so I'm already a bit skeptical lol
At a prior company I worked at, they had the requirement to allow pretty sophisticated and seamless "download report as pdf" functionality. So exactly what you're asking about, more or less.
The solution they came to was to have the "Print to PDF" button call an endpoint that launched a headless chrome instance that printed the page, and to have a pile of print media css rules. It worked... Far better than it really should have.
As someone with a Bachelors degree in (Pure) Mathematics from a state university, I'll comfortably say that it hasn't caused any problems for me in my 10+ full stack/data engineer career, and I've never gotten any impression that a Masters would've made things better.
Compiler work might be different, but I'd suspect not.
As for networking opportunities... Not really. You'll be networking with people with 0 years in professional dev work, mostly in a academia. They aren't contacts that will benefit you.