[meheleventyone]

This is poor advice because plenty of games of all sizes are shipped using custom engines.

It’s comes about because there are lots of people who say they want to make a game who are far more happy eternally twiddling their tech. Moving to Unity/Unreal/PlayCanvas etc. wouldn’t dampen that impulse just push it in different directions. It’s a bit of an empty page problem where it much easier to obsess about having the right starting conditions than it is to actually just start. Particularly as these people tend towards being more technically capable without a lot of design experience.

[chungus_khan]

It's both important to pick the right tools for the job and also to not get lost in the weeds with that decision, and that's not just a gamedev thing either (though the design work in gamedev makes it really show). I see it a lot in web with pretty much every piece of tech, and the more inconsequential to the functioning of the final deliverable, the more twiddling goes on. Fortunately those twiddlers do tend to really care about the actual technical quality of the project if you can get them actually working on it.