[MivLives]

About your junior dev it might also be the way he was taught React.

I'm also a junior and the way I was introduced to React was by teaching me enough JS that I could theoretically write React (with a bunch of research).

One of the things I've noticed among other junior engineers (including myself) is tutorial driven development. Through a mixture of inexperience, laziness, and self doubt it can be easier to find someone else who's implemented something and just use theirs. Rather then thinking about a complex problem and naively coding up a solution finding someone else's hopefully battle tested code.

An example of this is how I used to make JS based games. I essentially used an array to toggle classes on a grid of divs divs in the style of an LCD screen. I hadn't heard of html's canvas element. My solution worked but I don't think anyone would think it's a particularly good one. If I had found someone's snake game and saw they used canvas I could have saved myself some headache.