While agree with your conclusion, I don't agree with your argument to reach it. Any software development sits on such a tall and wobbly stack of dependencies that no one human can even understand every layer, let alone build it. For most projects, I don't hand-solder together transistors into the logic layer, write my own bootstrapping compiler out of hex assembly instructions, or directly interface with graphics drivers to display the program's output. That doesn't make these be bad programs or bad projects, just because they are focused on only one part of the program space.

My concern isn't in "ignorance" or "cheating", but in spending time to learn a technology or framework that may quickly become obsolete.