>> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.

> As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering.

Almost all Software Engineering, as practiced, is not a form of engineering in any way. Many times Software Engineering is really a bunch of commodity workers, who are learning, assembling commodity components that don't really work, under the oversight of a more senior developer who helps everything not fall apart.