I use a similar criteria for programmers/developers, if you have sound fundamentals in troubleshooting and working through a (technical) problem on your own you are more useful than someone who after hiring lacks those skills. The learning curve of any dev job is a sequence of problem solving steps to get to the technical knowledge required to speak of the code accurately. If they are not willing or able to do that work without handholding and you don't have time to handhold it's probably not going to work as well than someone who can do this independently.

If you haven't encountered someone who is unwilling to even look at a makefile/build/ide setting page without assistance you might not see the use of it.

I think they are talking about picking up unfamiliar tools and languages that are reasonably close to their existing skillset rather than 'learning to code'.

Maybe, evaluating a dev is tricky, judging them on soft skills alone would lead to many false positives and negatives.

Sure. I think the parent is implying that this evaluation is what is flawed, and overly driven by a focus on the superficial layers of technology.

So, for instance, a Reactjs developer fresh out of bootcamp gets considered over a veteran Angular developer, 'because they know React.'