Comment by whakim

I think there's a huge spectrum between "pokes around in source code occasionally" and "maintains critical infrastructure." Learning to read and understand the open source software that powers a lot of the toolchain is a big part of the development of a lot of engineers, and said toolchain mostly not being written in a language you're familiar with is a barrier to that (not an insurmountable barrier, but still a barrier, to be clear).

I agree with you that the juice is worth the squeeze here, but I don't think it's right to pretend that there's absolutely zero cost in terms of the learning pathway for the next generation of open source contributors and maintainers.