There are companies who will only hire you if you got a degree and relevant experience. The big tech companies never mention it but most of the workforce had a long education.
Requiring a master's for a dev position is just a joke and I wouldn't take a company seriously that was asking that.
Above not true for roles like PM, where for better or worse an MBA carries weight.
I've seen it in almost every place I worked for in London. The floor is either only people with degrees or only people with no degrees.
The degree is never announced as a requirement, it's rather selected automatically during the interview. For instance in programming, some questions about state machines and graph traversal will do a wonderful filter.
Going back to the medical analogy, just because someone has a medical degree doesn't mean they're a good surgeon. They'd need additional certification to prove their surgery skills.