I doubt it's just objectively poor code. If there is even an objective way of evaluating code. There are probably abstractions that could be added or removed to

I doubt it's just objectively poor code. If there is even an objective way of evaluating code. There are probably abstractions that could be added or removed to make things simpler. Perhaps comments could be clarify some things. Thinking, writing, and implementing takes time, though. I also doubt you're just not smart enough. Understanding code that you didn't write and does something non-trivial takes a lot of time. Days or weeks if you want a strong understanding of a complex application. It feels like time is the constraint to most things in software, and in life. Deciding how much time you want to spend is very personal. The blog post suggests a 30 minutes per day of reading docs. If it's important to you, maybe 30 minutes or longer of reading code per day would be worthwhile.