I personally had a blast and absolutely incredible time in both CS 61A and 61B. That they're "weeder" classes can be considered true only from the perspective that they're challenging classes but note that almost all CS/Math classes in Berkeley are highly challenging and these weren't outliers at all.
Before coming to college I had tons of programming experience and two interships. I wrote websites, backends, real life applications shipped to customers, school club websites, I even taught C++ in my high school's IEEE chapter. CS 61A completely changed my perspective on how to think about code, I found it so valuable that I could graduate just with 61A, study everything else (algorithms, data structures etc) myself and be fine with it (this is likely an exaggeration of course, there is some value to finishing a traditional CS curriculum).
This. I went into the CS program cold, no prior programming experience at all. After CS3 and CS61A/B/C my relationship with my brain changed entirely. My approach to deconstructing and then solving problems, of any kind, radically improved.
Before coming to college I had tons of programming experience and two interships. I wrote websites, backends, real life applications shipped to customers, school club websites, I even taught C++ in my high school's IEEE chapter. CS 61A completely changed my perspective on how to think about code, I found it so valuable that I could graduate just with 61A, study everything else (algorithms, data structures etc) myself and be fine with it (this is likely an exaggeration of course, there is some value to finishing a traditional CS curriculum).