This is sort of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" issue. I have a very smart friend who doesn't code, but is a math wiz and makes a

This is sort of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" issue. I have a very smart friend who doesn't code, but is a math wiz and makes a ridiculously high salary at a big tech company. She'll do things with spreadsheets that seem like a ridiculously complicated and inefficient way to do things that I could efficiently do with a couple lines of code. But of course, she can also quickly do things with spreadsheets that would take me forever to code up. She earns that big salary. This is like that. I guess it is unfortunate that this developer never ran into bitwise operators, but honestly, I have hardly used them in decades (I learned to code in C, now I'm mostly JavaScript and Typescript). Obviously the developer has a lot of really useful skills, and in this case was able to solve the problem, if not optimally. I bet that developer is a lot more productive in general, than me from 25 years ago who knew bitwise operators but none of that other crazy stuff.