Often you don't need to reimplement 100% of functionality of a library but just a 1% of it. Then, a talented team can usually make that 1% higher quality just b

Often you don't need to reimplement 100% of functionality of a library but just a 1% of it. Then, a talented team can usually make that 1% higher quality just because they are not limited by the complexity and tradeoffs added by the remaining 99%. Also many "battle-tested" libraries are not really very high quality - they all have bugs, unnecessary complexity and technical debt. Higher degree of testing they get is often offset by the higher number of feature requests, and more features means more complexity and more bugs. And in reality I saw it many times when a niche library written by a solo developer is of a higher quality than a super popular behemoth written by hundreds of developers over 10 years.