An elegant bamboo structure in Vietnam

The beautiful thing about wooden structures is that it's relatively easy to replace any part that has rotten away. It's even easier with bamboo, which is an inherently modular material. You could disassemble and reassemble the whole thing if you wanted. Over time the building becomes a kind of Ship of Theseus.

It might not be economical to maintain such a complex structure for a long time, though, so unless it's a very important building they'll just tear it down and build something new. Permanence is not really a concept that Asian cultures usually associate with wooden structures, anyway. The fact that they age, change, adapt, and eventually give way just like ourselves is one of the factors that make them feel so "natural".

You might be in awe if you could see the bones of what you think of as ordinary buildings. You might marvel to see a team hanging from lanyards to tie rebar. Or you probably just hurry by wondering when all this construction mess will be over.

I find this statement shallow and irritating.

You seem to be extrapolating from your ignorance of construction techniques and attributing them to Americans as a whole.

Bamboo construction is not vernacular in America. But the skills of the artisans who build in bamboo are no less (and no more) than those who build in other locally traditional materials.

And you're wrong to discount the architects. The truth is that bamboo is actually a very cooperative material to work with. It's almost magical after being trained on stick-built structures (2x4s) or masonry. It's light, strong, as flexible as you want it to be, and comes in almost whatever length and width you want. Lashing is easy (if tedious at scale).

So, 100% agreed that the artisans involved in building this structure are skilled. And bamboo engineers are thicker on the ground in SE Asia than in America. The architects and designers also get a huge amount of credit for understanding how to use the material and succeeding, structurally and aesthetically.

Edit: Now if you want to talk about the likelihood of a structure like this passing building code in America, without significant extra expense for structural engineering studies and alterations for fire code, then there is an reasonable conversation to be had. But this has nothing to do with the skill of the builders.