The best programmers I know

Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business.

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.

You ultimately own all of your dependencies, even if you never look at them. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, when starting a new project I'd do a couple things.

1) look for all the problems we were going to need to solve and look for 3rd party libs that solve those problems

2) I would do a set of PoC using just that 3rd party library and see what the dev experience as like. I build it from source, read the code, look at the code hygiene, etc.

3) Everything would get checked in as source into our repo, a "full build" would build the 3rd party libraries, you would get source level debugging into everything. You could make invasive changes into libs as part of development, etc.

Every dependency had to earn its place, you didn't just pull in a bunch of things because you needed one function.

When you need this capability is at the exact wrong time for your build and dev process to be able to take on this work. People are panicking, shits broken, no one knows what is going on. If you have everything lined up, you can still do solid engineering using the scientific method, fix your problem and move on.