There are lot's of hot takes right now on meshes, and some folks criticizing what Kelsey says here, but this is just a suggestion not "the way" different folks learn different ways.

Let me make an analogy https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1291519301170561024

Some folks are totally cool with not peeking behind the curtain, and using abstractions with all of their blissful magic. More power to them, that's great!

This is sort of like math classes that hand you fancy theorems to use, and that works for some folks.

I took other classes where the teacher proved every theorem they taught starting from some fundamental axioms.

This is great for folks (like me) where my recall is improved by being able to reconstruct how things work and form an intuition about them.

I see Kelsey's "the hard way" as a form of teaching in the style of the latter, and it's not for everyone. Some folks will happily never peek behind the curtain.

However, there are others for whom this is useful and even necessary.

Kelsey didn't say "go do this in prod!" or anything, he said "if you find all this ... confusing, and you really want to understand it...".

Kelsey was just trying to educate us, and I for one greatly appreciate his lessons.