I think this article needs to be more specific in specifying developers who copy-and-paste AND don't take the time to understand the codes.

I believe a lot of developers, even senior ones will do that because sometimes even though you know how to solve the problem, you want to look outside to see if there are better and more optimised ways to do things. That's just continuous learning.

Of course, I understand where you came from. Before the days of stackoverflow.com and as recent as certain big data platforms, the solutions weren't available online and and certain problems are really brain-crackingly difficult.

All I can say is, perhaps this is a paradigm shift in the world of development. Most applications no longer faced the same constraints compared to 20 years ago. For example, memory used to be an issue and we learn algorithms to optimise our use of memories. Nowadays, new coders probably don't come with that knowledge if they aren't from computer science/engineering background. Similarly, the improvement in processing speed also means that learning the Big O and compute efficiency is no longer that important to most employers. As a final example, remember back in the days where we used to build our own linked lists from scratch? Now they came with the standard packages, optimised for most common usage.

The development world have moved on to productivity, measured in products deliveries. There will be some who don't care about understanding what they do because of the short-termness of their contract and of the project (it will sooner be someone else's problem rather than later). While personally I look at it with distaste, it is the the world we all lived in now. I only hope that tech leads can enforce standards before the new generation move up to replace them.