And, in today’s corporate how many story points did you complete this sprint “what have you done for me lately” panopticon culture, building your own looks like productivity, gaining an understanding looks like slacking - a fireable offense. Supposed tech labor shortage or not, few of us have the luxury of looking unproductive regardless of what we’re actually accomplishing.
Beats me, I've never tried to learn it - it was the author's example of a framework that's harder (or appears to be harder) to learn than to just reimplement from first principles. Replace "React" with something that does fit that description if you like. Unless you think there is no such thing?
And just to imagine somebody lacking ability to comprehend something while having an ability to implement their own... Sounds weird.
I don't think React is in that category though, I think the concepts are understandable, the documentation is good, and StackOverflow is helpful.
I implemented a small React app while learning it which is in production and running just fine.
I think the pressure towards "just write code" comes from somewhere else.