"What if we abstracted away X?"
My dude, you're already operating on like five levels of abstractions, and you haven't the slightest clue how any of them work. The answer isn't another abstraction, it's learning how computers actually operate.
So I'm ready for him to test my backend, I tell him to make a request to https://... and pass this and that parameter. And he just has no clue what I'm talking about. He somehow managed to learn React, a bit of HTML and a bit of CSS without any of the underlying basics. I had to explain him some of HTTP, the URL structure, and what an XMLHttpRequest is.
This was a revelatory experience for me.
I couldn’t care less how much customers like something; what matters to me is if it’s technically perfect.
This is also why I will never be happy at any job, because it turns out technical perfection doesn’t pay the bills.
For example, I'm sure many of the common command-line utilities are considered technically perfect by their developers, but outside of some common use cases you've memorized, they are all a pain to use because of how undiscoverable CLI is by its nature. The "wrong input, go read some manuals" style of error messages doesn't help either.
I myself always start from user requirements and work my way down from there.
If you think that's sluggish, that's a you problem.
I doubt it, sounds like confirmation bias.