One person wrote books like JRR Tolkien. His name was JRR Tolkien, and those books are widely celebrated by millions of people as classics.

I don’t have any issue with people using an engine like Godot or Unity or RPG Maker or Unreal or anything else, but I do think that there can be value in “owning the entire stack” of a project, even if that means “reinventing the wheel”.

When I do a project involving HTTP, I could reach for Rails or something, it’s a valid enough and I certainly have done that plenty of times, but I often will work with a lower level protocol. Depending on the language I will use a more simple HTTP server thing like Axum with Rust, and other times I will go full epoll/Selector with a raw socket.

I do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I can build my own framework that works in a way that I think and I don’t pull in a bunch of extra crap I don’t need. I can optimize the “hot paths” of my particular project without worrying about a one-size-fits-all you get for generic frameworks, I don’t have to worry as much about leaky abstractions, and I am intimately familiar with a much larger percentage of the codebase.

There is value in both approaches.