1) There might be a little too much mystique around "self taught". A guitar player might be deemed "self taught" because they didn't take lessons. But in actuality, they downloaded a bunch of tabs, watched YouTube videos, ask fellow musicians questions, listened to a huge variety of existing music. They had teachers, they just didn't call themselves teachers.
Development is the same thing. Even if you didn't go to school for it, you learned along the way through reading, googling, co-workers, whatever.
As for me, I'm absolutely not self-taught. In high-school I took programming courses and loved them and excelled at them. In college I took both programming, art, and design courses. I've taken online courses. I've read a ton of books on design and development. All that in addition to the normal course of learning through community and doing. I'm very much a product of teaching.
2) The biggest project going right now is Rails, but React/Redux inside of it, and SCSS/PostCSS.
3) We have a podcast called CodePen Radio that talks about this stuff a lot. It's that stuff above, plus some Node, MySQL, loads of AWS servers.
4) I probably skim at least one.