Now imagine you're just starting and you want to get hired as a spot welder.
You don't work 38 to 60 hours a week welding, though. You do something else for a living. But you want to move onto welding.
In that case, besides spending their personal time doing side projects, how do you expect someone to work on their skills?
What exactly do you personally interpret as the post, and thus perceive it was moved in any way? Have you been paying attention to the discussion?
Your basic hobbyist weld is like hello-world. As a side note, one sign of a bad engineer is one who underestimates difficulties in fields outside their expertise.
Like most professions you can become as skilled at it as you wish, depending on your willingness to work to get better. There are a lot of different types of welding, lots of different pieces of equipment to learn and master, and way more different materials to work with than most people realize.
Also, different situations present different challenges (like the fact that you have to be mindful of how your welds can warp the material).
I personally only know some the details second-hand (have professional welders in my family), but I know I'd want the guy with 20 years of experience over the one with 5, if I had something challenging I needed fixed.
A lot of that is self-inflicted, though. How many javascript frameworks, all solving essentially the same problem, are there? It's just change for change's sake.
Whenever we're tempted to reach that conclusion, we should consider that there might be something going on that we don't understand. In the case of JS frameworks, I think developers really are still figuring out the best way to implement a dynamic UI that's both efficient and maintainable.
I'm a welder by trade. Occasionally I do a spot of welding at home, but the 38 to 60 hours a week I've spent twenty years doing has made me a vastly better metal fabricator than the few side projects I've done.
But I can rant endlessly to you about my other interests, some of which tie in nicely to a wider-perspective-of-life than just metal fabrication, and it's those other interests that have proven to set me apart from the pack and advanced my career way more.
Could you just ask a person what fun or interesting or challenging things they've worked on, whether in their paid line of work or as a side-project, and leave aside your value judgements about what they do outside of work.
Core point: stop thinking your experience generalises to the whole population.