[honestlyidk]

"Is it worth getting into the the subject? It would take a major commitment in time and efforts. Would it help with better career opportunities?"

I guess its an opportunity cost. What else would you be doing besides that. with 12 years of experience Id hope that you have some understanding about the subject already and arent completely in the dark. I guess with 12 years I would say it should take you no time to pick it up cause I would expect you to already be well into APIs and Oauth.

I wouldnt hurt your career opportunities. But I guess you could do something more established like get a data science degree or work with embedded systems to work with robots. Its really about what you want. But doing this is better than doing nothing.

Technically I think that a lot of people do it for a cool factor rather than for a need. You can add uncessary complexity without benefit. I dont find there to be too much deep complex ideas about it.

Basically you are performing separation of concerns across a network vs doing it by creating different class files, this allows you to offset query load to an entire set of servers which helps scaling. But your company also has to pay of another set of servers.