I've personally spent untold thousands of hours learning as much as I can about all the subjects I'm interested in online, and I don't regret spending my time in that way. I think it's made me a better person, not just intellectually, but also emotionally and when it comes to interpersonal relationships and empathy. That being said, online autodidacticism is definitely not for everyone, and I don't judge anyone who only gets on the internet for social media or funny videos. In all likelihood, they've developed a lot of the same non-academic skills that I have through personal experience IRL, and I imagine that they're really good at things I've never even considered learning.
A lot of people with extracurricular interests in especially the physical sciences or philosophy like to think of their pursuits as more noble than those of someone who's interested in, say, cooking or sports or makeup or whatever, but even assuming that's objectively true, does it matter in the grand scheme of things? It's vastly improbable that any of us are going to be the next Einstein or Pauling or Feynman or Watson/Crick or whoever else discovered paradigm-shifting things--most of us won't even push the understanding of the fields we're interested in slightly ahead by getting a Ph.D or doing research outside an academic setting. What good does knowing these fields do, ultimately, if no one else substantially benefits from our knowledge?
I'm not saying you or I or anyone in this thread don't have the ability to actually do something powerful with what we've learned, just that statistically the vast majority of people who look down on those ignorant of "proper" fields won't. There are plenty of cool things you can do in your life with, say, chemistry, but they aren't really any more important and are honestly generally less useful than what you can do with cooking. I actually like both a lot; this is coming from both personal experience as well as looking at it as a hypothetical.
People should just do what makes them happy as long as it doesn't harm others--they shouldn't feel obligated to learn academic subjects like you said if they don't want to. I used to think a lot like you do, but through making friends different than me, dating, and ironically learning more online, I changed my view and stopped having a problem with "ignorant" people. Not knowing physics doesn't make you stupid, and knowing physics doesn't make you smart.