I also disagree with the “read books instead” stuff. As long as you’re not using your homegrown crypto in production, and more generally as long as you’re not doing stupid things like reusing single-use tokens, why would I care how you choose to spend your learning time? Though if I’m catching these mistakes in pull requests, I might suggest a formal curriculum for the sake of actual software safety.

I see the same problems in internet debates about which programming language to learn first or how to learn programming in general, and a lot of it just doesn’t take into account that learning is a long journey and staying on the path is often more important than taking the fastest or cleanest path. If trying to roll your own stuff is more engaging, great!