Having experience /is/ attractive. Not having it, though, is opposite of attractive, especially at 40 and without a degree.
Reading the article, I don't think "Now, life at a traditional office was not that bad: barely any work to be done, it mostly involved sitting at a desk and writing some emails all day. " means he had a developer job.
That might be the case. That's pretty much a definition of software development: 1) there is always a lot to do, in any code base 2) doing that for years, even if it's just improving the same code base, will give new challenges and experience.
If you don't have work to do and you aren't learning and progressing then you aren't doing software development, at least not properly.
