I have studied algorithms in college. I believe the goals of leetcode vs the goals of graph theory may be against each other.

A good graph theory course abstracts away the details of code and pursues the goal of understanding how many problems can be expressed concisely and clearly through graphs.

A good leetcode practice ... honestly just hones how patient you are in debugging and memorising various code patterns.

If you want to pursue money, it's almost always better to pursue leetcode exclusively

This is not true.

Graph theory and algorithm engineering overlap a great deal. And not only in the directly graph theoretic terms like BFS, Dijkstra, Flow, etc, but also in that you need a good grasp of greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, divide and conquer, and several other general techniques.

You don't need to be a good algorithm engineer to secure a high-paying job though. In fact high-paying jobs regularly turn away strong algorithm engineers because they can't pass leetcode challenges.

The advice is sound -- if you want money focus on the flashy buzzword thing, not the actually useful thing.

I think their point is that there's a split between the modeling / mathematical focus versus an imperative algorithm focus.

Kind of like how being good at relational-databases and SQL is different than being good at coding up B-tree implementations.