a.k.a. quality vs productivity. And as you said, the second gets all the glory.

Reinventing wheels does not always get you better wheels...

Often, with the type of developer who insists on reinventing wheels because it's "easy", you get a pretty bad wheel, as it's the first such wheel the developer has built and their estimation of "easy" was built on a foundation of ignorance.

To be needlessly pedantic, reinventing wheels never gets you better wheels. The entire point of the idiom is that the wheel is already a perfect machine and any effort made trying to improve upon it is wasted. At best, you just expend time and effort to get the wheel again.

Which is why it doesn't belong in software - there is no software version of the wheel.

Yeah. Many times in software, I feel like I'm told: "Creating your own skateboard is reinventing the wheel, you don't want to do that. Instead use this train because it was written by Google and you won't do better".

Sure, but I need a skateboard, not a train.