Tried to do a full-time PhD, dropped out due to crippling poverty and depression. Tried to do an evening MBA, dropped out for the exact reasons you stated. Only Master's program that actually gelled with me was a professional MA in a stats-based profession.
My general stance is to not recommend a graduate program unless you're deeply passionate about the subject and you're willing to bear a significant amount of opportunity cost.
I went full time to grad school because of the pain that I saw others go through when they went part-time at night. If you're just in it for the learning, you might as well leverage Coursera. Whether it's a Phd or professional masters, full time is only justified if you want the networking or mentoring.
Industrial research in CS is in a very bad state. This makes faculty jobs even that more competitive. Honestly, as a professional researcher, I do not recommend a PhD for anyone at this point.
I'm curious where you are writing from. In Silicon Valley it seems like there's a demand for CS Phds so long as they can pitch themselves as data scientists. Google, Microsoft and others hire lots of Phds too. It gets very thin elsewhere though.
I am talking about the Bay area as well as North America. For a while, I kept getting recruiters trying to interview me as a data scientist when they saw a PhD in my linkedIn profile. I ended up having conversations with said recruiters explaining to them PhD != data scientist.
My general stance is to not recommend a graduate program unless you're deeply passionate about the subject and you're willing to bear a significant amount of opportunity cost.