I take the exact opposite perspective in my personal life. If I've got a huge weekend project, I'm gonna go ahead and get (or rent) a chainsaw because my time

I take the exact opposite perspective in my personal life. If I've got a huge weekend project, I'm gonna go ahead and get (or rent) a chainsaw because my time is valuable to me and I don't need to live through the struggle of manual tools to understand the benefits of technology. What does the day of struggling with branch cutters and an axe before succumbing and renting a chainsaw really earn you? Do you really feel like you did a better job or something because you felt like you earned the chainsaw? I've written an HTTP server from scratch before. I've experimented with scaling it up in multiple ways. I've admitted defeat and gone back to using pre-existing software. Other than scratching an itch to learn, I can't tell you one fungible benefit I got from that exercise as it relates to developing a REST API. Why should a software engineer who builds a REST API need to understand the inner workings of HTTP to use an HTTP framework? Why should a software engineer need to build a massive UI to understand how hard state tracking is to use React? Chances are someone is paying for that code which, by definition, is worse than it should be because it's an exercise in learning why the framework is necessary.