It's presented like a magic fact of life, in reality people do what they are taught and are quite impotent without knowledge, most universities have some sort of compiler course probably using the dragon book, or a derivative copy and these students proceed to go out into the real world and write more or less the same implementation they saw in school with the same mistakes.

Compilers are interesting, but there is literally no proof that they are optimal for any of their popular applications. Which is what I think you are trying to imply by this narrative you have constructed of people constantly reinventing compilers. This is just the same propagandist argument lispweenies make to claim that their language is special.