I'm not sure why this intuition is so strong, I had it myself before learning this stuff in my early 20s on shipping projects (both existing, and from scratch)

I'm not sure why this intuition is so strong, I had it myself before learning this stuff in my early 20s on shipping projects (both existing, and from scratch) and at the end of that I was still in my early 20s. Despite this intuition it's all actually very learnable and my experience is that using a parser generator makes no sense in a professional context and very little sense in a hobby/toy project context.