I am a cynical and curmudgeonly person so I am usually want to agree with your take, however I think you have missed something critically important: Most techn

I am a cynical and curmudgeonly person so I am usually want to agree with your take, however I think you have missed something critically important: Most technical people learn by doing. There is value in doing something even if you throw it away, even with hardware in meatspace, because it gains you knowledge and intuition about how the better/established thing works. This knowledge can be golden. I have a very deep understanding of a lot of systems that most people never touch because they “just work” and are well implemented. I have that understanding exactly because of garbage toy projects (most of which I never shared). This knowledge has made me invaluable in many projects/jobs in my life, because nobody else bothers to understand those systems. In fact, one of the most obvious (although perhaps not most efficient) ways to do clean room reverse engineering is to treat a system as a modeled black box and try to naively reimplement it using your own assumptions and then benchmark your outputs against the black box model. This reveals significant knowledge about the workings of the black box.