There are bad engineers in the US as well as India. If you are paying $9 per hour, you are not getting the good Indian engineers. It is like going to a local McDonalds and hiring programmers. You deserve what you get.
I work on compilers for a living, but I couldn't build an IC if you put me in front of an EUV machine. Does that mean that I don't have an understanding of how things work "under the hood"?
But in my experience, people saying "under the hood" are using it with respect to the level of abstraction they are working with. There's a major inflection point in effectiveness when you go "one level deeper", or understand how the tools you are directly using are implemented, even though there are certainly many layers of abstractions below those tools. It helps a ton with debugging and performance work, and you start to really understand the limitations of your toolchain.
BTW, nobody is an expert within just 3 years. That is a key indicator of a Dunning-Kruger moment that becomes clear by drilling down just a bit into key performance indicators from research and experience.
This isn't a satisfying explanation, since "putting text on the screen" can be a pretty complicated task. My limited understanding of web development is that the conceptual model is actually a decent bit more complicated than non-web-developers give credit, and React seems like a prime (if somewhat self-inflicted) example of that.
A trivial example of someone being an expert in 3 years is being the original creator of a thing. Time is a sufficient factor, but I don't think it's a necessary one (and we acknowledge this implicitly by acknowledging that people learn at different rates).
As the creator of a once extremely popular productivity tool I can firmly attest that being the creator of such tool is not a sufficient qualifier to elevate one to “expert” of the given problem space provided just 3 years time.
Or is it just keeping them away from new competitors. Or just general games of corporate fiefdom and team sizes?