That's the difference between programmers and engineers.

Programmers fix the code, engineers fix the underlying issue. Engineering is being able to spot patterns and know enough about a subject to be able to research it properly and efficiently. "Is this a state machine?", "can I represent this as a tree?", "is this a regular language or do I need a more sophisticated parser?".

I recall someone from a bootcamp writing a cascade of nested if-else statement, 6 level deep in some places. Then someone with a real engineering background told him that he was basically building a finite state machine, to which the other dev responded that "he didn't need anything fancy, just for the function to work". Eye opening.