> No university teaches you about how to assess an engineering problem, how to break it down, how to create at timeline/estimate, etc.

Many of them do actually. Obviously you will not be very good at it before having actual work experience, but it is useful to be open to thinking about it.

> How can you learn to solve engineering problems without doing engineering?

Yet that's the opposite of what the article focuses on: mostly soft-skills and all the fluff that surrounds the actual engineering work, like dealing with project maintainers, figuring out github, etc.

This approach, when taken to the extreme*, would lead people to be very good at explaining why they opened a certain pull request, but couldn't even merge it on the CLI because that's not something you need for a FOSS contribution.

* note this part