Grinding leetcode and learning art seem at odds here. If you're a dev grinding leetcode, you'd likely be working in AAA where your time would be wasted making assets.

IMO doing both code and art at the same time is the best place to be, and it has served my career well, in both CG films and in games. The point of learning art isn’t necessarily to get a job making assets, it’s to be a better developer, and learning art seriously will make you a better developer. (Also artists who learn to code seriously are better artists, this goes both ways.)

It’s a mistake to think that software engineers making assets is a waste of time. Engineering and games in general would be better if every dev took a rotation in the art department. The reason companies silo and specialize their teams isn’t for your benefit, it’s for the short-term efficiency of a specific production.

It’s a bonus that you could make assets if you want, as opposed to the vast majority of programmers who can’t. Being able to code+art will also give someone a major leg up in small shops and/or for solo devleopment.

I would argue sadly in this economy it is not. I don't think you should be learning how to model and texture, but you absolutely should be learning how 3d data, textures, materials, metadata and so on are structured. Specifically you should understand matrix multiplication, traversing rigs and scene hierarchies, float array and integer array buffers for face index and vertex data, and so on. The list is very very long, and unless you are purely like, an online account web dev or cross platform bit twiddler which I feel is greatly decreasing in value (and is very competitive because of 40 years of bit twiddlers before you), then you absolutely need to be doing this stuff. Once you've done all that, you'll find the modeling part isn't even so far away from you for hard surfaces at least, but organic is truly its own life quest. You're right on that part.