Ok so the author inherited a project (in R!) as an intern, and successfully finished it in 3 months. He delivered, that's good, not bad. After that, he wished to reinvent the system to make it better. That's not per se bad, but the problem IMO is that his wish was granted (maybe due to his earlier success), clients payed, and apparently he wasn't accompanied by a senior during that task. Somebody should have explained him earlier, that everything has its tradeoffs, including OOP and all the other stuff. Now the author curses OOP and flirts with microservices. For me it seems that he is not a bad programmer, but works in a company which does not care enough about its junior devs.
> My boss was able to implement a feature using Node.js and 20 lines of code that I thought that would take me at least 200 (he’d never programmed in JavaScript before).
That just means that their boss has more experience (perhaps a lot more experience) than they have. Being an inexperienced programmer is something we all went through at some point in our careers, and doesn't mean we were bad programmers. I'd say a bad programmer is someone who doesn't want to learn new things or listen to advice on how they can improve themselves.
In my place of work there aren't other programmers. I'm kind of a "one man show" there.
And you got this precisely right, I should've know better and before starting the rewrite and thought about the trade-offs.
I think that the point I was trying to make is that I've always been kind of blind to the fact that there are alternatives to OOPL and that they're are viable.