I am kind of living by this; I really don't see how a "menial" job experience transfers onto "exciting" jobs. If you want to do ML or program computer graphics,

I am kind of living by this; I really don't see how a "menial" job experience transfers onto "exciting" jobs. If you want to do ML or program computer graphics, 5 years of writing CRUD code in Python will probably not do wonders for you. Unless of course before that you had scarce programming experience, and even then I don't see why would you need to sit all of those 5 years out. Seems like this kind of advice boils down to "dress for the job you want...".