>Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases!

Improving a wheel design does not require reinventing it. The people who designed the car wheel were able to look at previous designs of wheels instead of needing to invent the wheel themselves.

So too with game engine design, where you have dozens of designs and hundreds of tutorials to learn from in the building of your own. It is seriously funny that no matter how you try to contort the metaphor, it continues to fit perfectly in a way that indicates it is not actually a bad thing.