As a degreeless completely self-taught programmer with a strong interest in vm implementations and garbage collection (eg I found the MLKit paper to be super exciting and at the time an incredible innovation (and then rust came along shortly after that)), I feel obligated to inform you that since ruby 2.2 (which is required by Rails 5+), symbols are in fact garbage collected, and are thus now effectively the same as string interning with #freeze.
And how many companies are only know posting blogs about their upgrades to Rails 5+ and how difficult that was?
It's still relevant knowledge.
Sure, degreeless self-taught programmers who know their way around this knowledge exist. I never said they didn't. But when you've got 500 applicants and your resume says you were flipping burgers two years before you got your junior position...I don't have time to interview you.
