The best programmers I know

I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve.

I'll throw an entire contraption away the moment I determine it has accumulated some opacity that antagonizes root cause analysis. This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks. You can certainly chase the rabbit over the fence into the 3rd party's GitHub repo, but I find the experience gets quite psychedelic as you transition between wildly varying project styles, motivations and scopes.

Being deeply correct nearly all of the time is probably the fastest way to build a reputation. The curve can be exponential over time with the range being the value of the problem you are entrusted with.

I was with you until this line. I've never seen a codebase where Not Invented Here Syndrome resulted in a stack that "antagonizes root cause analysis" in any way. I once worked at a C++ shop that had NIH'ed a supposedly thread safe string class, and it wasn't pretty.

There's plenty mature robust tech out there, and the chance that your own inventions are equally free of quirks and edge cases as battle-tested frameworks/libraries/databases that have had 1000s of eyeballs on them sounds quite unlikely to me, regardless of your programming skill.