Reading books to increase your understanding puts you ahead of 90% of people who graduated from a CS program in the last 5-10 years from what I've seen. Several of my coworkers admitted to having never read a book on anything related to software engineering before and it shows.
Having parents who expose you to these things and instill curiosity and passion puts you ahead of 99.9% of people who graduated from a CS program if you decide to go through that yourself. Direct early-life hands-on experience is a huge privilege and it is important to remember that.
And youtube/twitch. I think in the last couple of years a lot of new content creators with very high and maybe more niche topics started producing videos or streaming, and for me at least it is quite entertaining and educational. It doesn't replace books, I don't think short-form, more or less spontaneous content ever could, but given how low-effort text production these days is, it filters out some of the noise.
If articles are more efficient, then it means there are plenty of nonsense in books. I don't think good books are filled with a lot of nonsense, if they are, then they are not good.
However, it's a fact that there are a lot of books which are collections of many trivial topics, collections of unrelated articles.
