The weird part about programming is that it's possible to never attend a course, read a book (or especially an academic paper), and still be a very productive programmer.
In as much as Programming is a means of expressing your thought forms to solve a problem precisely, your "productive programmer" would be quite limited in what he can actually do due to a lack of knowledge of what has already been systematized before. If you don't know something already exists you quite obviously cannot use it where it is most needed.
In many cases because what they contain has been integrated (in whole or in part) into the normal order of business.
Some of the big threads:
Structured programming. Even C and C++ constrain their goto statements to the same function. Most other languages have similar constraints or limit them to things like named loops/breaks. So you'll learn structured programming just by learning anything but assembly or old-school BASIC and FORTRAN (where there is some structured programming, but also a lot of unstructured programming).
Concurrency, Milner and Hoare's works have influenced many modern languages. CSP influenced or formed the basis of many modern concurrency systems. Go and Erlang/Elixir (anything on BEAM) are fairly mainstream languages that draw on it at least in part.ure* understanding of it because implementations aren't pure implementations of it for whatever reasons).
Even many of the type systems stuff. Type inference is used by many modern languages, generics/polymorphism is also used by most modern statically typed languages. Even Go finally got on the generics train.
So yeah, you don't need to study these papers to benefit from them, many (most?) modern languages are directly or indirectly influenced by them.
Oh No! That is quite the wrong way of looking at it.
One of my favourite quotes (attributed to Mark Twain) goes: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
It is with that sentiment in mind that one should "read" the above list of papers. They contain the distilled essence of somebody's lifework. One does not have to read and understand completely every bit of what has been written in the paper. Indeed without the proper background, that might be quite difficult. But one should be able to browse and pick out the main ideas from the paper (this is what i try to do with all the papers/books that i read). Keywords/Jargons/Things-that-one-might-not-understand are filed away at the back of the mind so that later on when one comes across the same/related concept we can go "aha" and gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter. This is the essence of gathering and assimilating knowledge.
You can be a writer without a literature degree.
You can be a painter without an art history degree.
You can be a scientist without a degree in the philosophy of science
Scientists generally have a Ph.D. degree in science. Although the Ph. in Ph.D. stands for philosophy, 99% of scientists don't learn philosophy, or even philosophy of science.
That said, a scientist without a Ph.D. is a rare bird.
Philosophy of science studies what it means to do science in a meta sense. A PhD in science is how to actually be a scientist. This is a critical difference. The papers in the linked article are akin to the former not the latter.
Also, even if one does not read books (or especially papers), he still will ask friends and colleagues about programming-related things. And those friends and colleagues may be avid readers of books (or especially academic papers). Even other's code can be considered derived from books (or especially academic papers).
So this uneducated yet productive programmer is unable to escape reading literature by proxy.
Also the comment I responded to only mentioned books and courses, so I'm not sure that your reply is relevant. I certainly do not read white papers myself--don't feel smart nor motivated enough to do that--but I do read plenty of reference books and take courses on CS theory, which derive their content from white papers anyway, except that the information is presented in a more readable and pedagogical manner.
It is not how it works. A single counter-example is enough to refute your point.
For simplicity (just the essence), imagine, you said: "I've never saw a white crow" (your experience) and I said: "I saw a white crow" (my experience). The conclusion that combines both: there are white crows.