There are technologies you think sound boring like Ansible that are a really good thing to learn. Companies like boring technology because it means the workers can spend time working on the product instead of cleaning up messes. I'm glad I learned Linux/vim/git but I wish I had spent a bit of time on deployment automation as well.
I spent way too much time messing around with low level stuff, it doesn't matter as much as you might think. I probably could have completely skipped university if I had given more attention to some of the more abstract ideas (don't try skipping it though, you don't know what you don't know and learning it this way can be painful.)