At the risk of sounding contrarian, I don’t think it’s mind-boggling at all. There are two types of software engineers out there: those who read to understand, and those who understand to read. What I mean by this is that I find most of my coworkers “read to understand”- they don’t know X (or, more commonly, they don’t understand X and want to prove the person who wrote “X” wrong), so they Google around until they find an SO that supports their stance, or gets them code that does what they want it to do…. Then there are those who understand that to be truly great is to read beyond the minimum needed to achieve the goal, be it to get software to do X, to prove someone wrong in code review, or something else… and to READ for pleasure and to quench the thirst of knowledge. The passionate folk, in other words.
Most of the time you can find out which group a person falls into by whether they read about and write code in their free time. Kind of like leetcode, this litmus test I find has a low false-positive rate, but a relatively high false-negative rate, as there are many passionate engineers who don’t have the time or energy to read and write in their free time (typically a “wife and kids” scenario).
E: in other words, those who code to live vs live to code.