I agree with what you said, but Isn’t the goal to survive the seed stage to find product market fit and customers at all costs? If you get that, you can raise money and hire engineers to rewrite your stack. If you fail to get customers, you might have a really maintainable codebase but no money and hence bankruptcy.
The point being that maybe it’s fine if there are a lot of people who only know how to glue frameworks together if they know enough to build useful products. Let all of them try; some of them might very well make it.
This totally matches my experience from two different perspectives.
1. Working as a programmer perspective: I worked at a company with good practices but so-so revenue. What happens: horribly underpaid salary, nice laptop (but not the one I want), nice working conditions. I am now working at a company with pretty great revenue and mediocre practices. What happens: good salary, I get the laptop I want (not the one I need), working conditions are mediocre.
2. UX perspective (I did a bootcamp for fun): UX'ers make throwaway prototypes all the time in order to validate a certain hypothesis. When that's done, they create the real thing (or make another bigger throwaway prototype).
I feel this is the best approach, from a business standpoint. This also means you have different kind of developers and it depends on the stage what kind they are. I'd separate it as prototype stage, mid-stage and massive scale stage.
The point being that maybe it’s fine if there are a lot of people who only know how to glue frameworks together if they know enough to build useful products. Let all of them try; some of them might very well make it.