That’s discounting the power of curiosity and discovery on a career trajectory. Seeing something neat and being able to access the source that makes it work is a powerful thing. Also, just the act of discovering that you can see how something works at all, and that it is in language you can kind of understand, is also powerful. There’s a huge difference for a young person who sees navBox.addClass('active') versus seeing x.y(b.a)
The web is incredibly radical in the fact that it is open standards and open source code. Nothing else works that way. It’s tragic when people who benefitted from that for so long are now racing towards a closed source web, whether it is actually or just effectively closed.
