It helped me. I jumped into AWS positions without any certifications. I was fine as long as I stuck what I needed to do. However, every time I had to work around a limitation of the architecture or come up with a strategy, it felt difficult as I had no context outside of the few services I touched. So I did the solution architecture cert and then the dev associate to understand how things are being planned in my project and plan and strategize better.

It depends on where you are in your career and what you're doing. A lot of devs don't need them for early career or at small companies, but if you want to get out of a pigeonhole and switch it up then they can help make that happen. And at large companies, they're very quantitative when it comes to performance reviews and can give you a bit of shielding from moody reviewers' feelings.

If you're finding yourself more in an architecture role, they help buy a little cred with the infra crew since they really like their certs. And if you're approaching a consulting principal type of role, they can serve as kind of a lingua franca for people who know little about you but are considering trusting you with their business.