Ask HN: Career death to take a year Sabbatical in your early 40s?

I'm 41. Currently working in a director role leading a team of about 15 reporting / business intelligence developers at a large insurance company.

My company has turned into a sweat shop of late. I've been working 60-70 hours / week, no vacations for more than a year. No support from my leadership team to staff appropriately or address the problems leading to the long hours.

I'm completely burned out and miserable. I get the urge to steer the car into a tree every morning on my way into the office. I need to make a change.

Thanks to a gambling windfall, I have an unexpected chunk of change in savings (more than a year worth of current salary) and am considering using it to take sabbatical (or year off, I guess, since I'd be quitting, not coming back).

My plan for the time off is to re-charge, regain my health through regular sleep and exercise, and refresh my skills. I got accepted to the GA Tech OMS Computer Science program, so would spend the entire time working through this degree.

Goal on the back-end would be to get a more intellectually stimulating job with less of a sweatshop environment.

Big worries:

I'm getting old for the IT space. 41 now, would be 42 or 43 by the time I'm hunting for jobs again.

Would the story of the reason for the time off play well to recruiters? As a hiring manager, I would have no problem with it if I saw it on a resume, especially if the degree were actually completed during the time off, but I acknowledge my bias on that.

Curious to get thoughts from HN on this. Bad idea? Good idea? Any advice for making it work well?