Comment by orthoxerox

A lot of the time the indie game developer is a former professional programmer. This of course affects how they interact with the game development process.

Someone who's coming from a different walk of life (say, an artist or a TTRPG designer trying to make a game) will obviously be much more productive with an off-the-shelf engine like GameMaker or Unity. They accept the engine with its editor as the only way to make a game and get cracking.

A programmer opens the editor and is presented with the 3D scene editor. "Nonono, where's main()?" they immediately ask. "Why is there a 3D scene editor if I want to procgen my levels?" "How do mods work?" "Who told you I needed physics simulation in my game by default?" "Running the game inside the editor is cool and all that, but I'd rather run the editor inside the game."