This answer is specifically from my personal experience rather than objective reasoning.

I think it very much depends on the actual person and their individual abilities rather than whether they read a lot or read at all in your genre.

I avoid using friends and family as beta readers even though they read prolifically and in my genre. The reason is two-fold:

They tend to read passively rather than actively and my work seems to flow over them. If they do have problems with it, they often can't articulate what's causing a disconnect for them because they don't understand enough about the craft to be able to strip a chapter down to its component parts and identify the cause.
They don't want to hurt my feelings, so their feedback is never brutal and honest enough to really be of any help. They usually just say, I loved it.

BUT, there are exceptions. My husband doesn't read fiction AT ALL. He reads one non-fiction book a year. Yet he is my first beta reader: always.

The reason is that, even though he doesn't read, he's heard me talk enough about the craft to have a basic understanding of it. He is also very logically-minded and seems able to separate the component parts of a scene or chapter to identify problems. He also knows that anything less than brutally-honest feedback is a complete waste of time for me and has no issues with hurting my feelings. His feedback is excellent and often mirrors that of experienced writers.

As @Ash says, you need to be discerning in choosing your readers, but I wouldn't necessarily judge them on how much or what they read.

Find your readers by asking dozens of people to read for you and then analyse their feedback. Weed out those who are too protective of your feelings and those who offer no positive critique at all and seem out to hurt and hinder you. Weed out those who can't articulate issues.

The secret is to find the balance of who reads for you and how many. Too much feedback can create a mess and too little won't highlight common problems.

Six is my magic number. Five of those are published authors, professional editors, PhD creative writers, journalists and my husband who is an IT Security Architect!

The magic number of the right readers will help you deal with this:

And another part of me feels that any excuse not to take someone's views too seriously, no matter how "logical" that excuse may be, paves the road to declaring one's writing already polished.

Because no matter how precious you are about your work, if the majority of your readers agree that something isn't working, you know you have to change it. But you need a number of readers to be able to do that. With only one or two, you can outnumber their opinion with your own. That's no good.

As for finding them, I met my beta readers on my creative writing degree and it was probably the most useful thing I got out of that degree. Courses are great places to meet other writers, to get to know them and read some of their work. As you work full-time, you probably aren't able to do a 3-year degree, but you could look at short classroom-based courses. Not only will it help your writing, it's a great place to find beta readers.

Good luck!

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