Thanks for saying this, I feel this way all the time even though I know it’s against the prevailing wisdom.

My experience is that in the pursuit of not reinventing the wheel, I am frequently told to use a dependency that doesn’t allow us to solve the whole problem, or prevents us from making making the user experience fast or cannot be made to understand our data model. It’s all well and good to use a tool that exists, but using the wrong tool just because it exists is madness. Even worse is when dependencies are deprecated or our use cases become unsupported. Honestly I would prefer to just build everything above the database layer in house, that way we at least know what we can and can’t deliver, and have some chance of fixing things when they break.

I am practically having this conversation at work. There's a sister team with a great tool for benchmarking what they are working on, but it is not convenient for our needs, and I am told to "just do the plumbing to make it work for our needs". Reality is that there are far, far easier ways to achieve what we need than doing all that plumbing, adding more layers of abstraction on top of what is a side project of an adjacent team.

The problem with being smarter than average programmer is that your insights will rarely ever be considered, even if they're correct, because they're new and controversial. That's because, from the perspective of an average programmer, a bad programmer who doesn't know what they're doing, and a programmer using techniques so advanced that they cannot be understood, are effectively indistinguishable, which means that average team will treat both geniuses and morons in the same way.

I feel like the collapse of the tech bro coincided with the masses going to programming, which changed the culture from promoting innovation and development, into simply following whatever best practices someone had already written, turning programming from a creative job into yet another repetitive office job. This is also, in my opinion, the true reason why salaries collapsed. Most business don't need creative specialists, they need code monkeys, and most people aren't creative specialists, they're code monkeys. So why would the salary worthy of a creative specialist even be talked about over here?

When dependencies don't deliver 100% of what you want, you should be able to work with upstream to get what you want added.

If upstream won't cooperate with you, then fork. It's still usually better to start from a battle-hardened codebase than it is from complete scratch.