[mhd]

In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer

Not just originally, for some professions you're still not allowed to have your own business without your "Meister" degree. Never understood why this included hairdressers…

Totally agree with your assessment of the web subsection of the IT profession. And it's quite splintered, with the "young turks" against academia against the enterprise, with plenty of small areas of expertise vanishing in the cracks. It does get a bit better if the forum of discussion is sufficiently abstract and spread over different niches (e.g. programming languages that transcend specific fandoms).