Is Competing On Kaggle Worth It? Ponderings of a Kaggle Grandmaster

I would not have a data science career without Kaggle. So if you are looking for a blog post bashing Kaggle, this is not the place. That said, I am not a radical that thinks Kaggle is the ultimate thing that everyone must do in order to become a data scientist. I want to give an honest opinion coming from the perspective of someone that heavily competed but decided to "retire" a few years ago. My career path is very weird, but I think it's an even more compelling case to show how spending time working on Kaggle competitions can help you. I am a law school dropout that didn't want to go back to college and decided it was a good idea to self-learn machine learning even though, at the time, almost all data science job postings required at least a Masters degree in STEM. I saw competing on Kaggle as my only shot at showing I knew what I was doing and compensating for not having academic credentials.