If Rob Pike can be said to be too technically unfamiliar for an Apple product, then there is something very very wrong with Apple's expectations of their users.
Is he too technically unfamiliar? Or is he trying to leverage assumed domain knowledge in an incorrect way? I mean, I'm not a programming languages expert. I couldn't work on Go. But I do know that the bootable OS X installer is within the app package upon which he was casting aspersions; I've used it myself to reinstall OS X and to install it on different machines.
Some friends of mine who are professionals in other fields have noted (not about me, I hope, but I know that I'm guilty of this at times as well) that "computer people" have no end of cases where they think their preexisting knowledge is enough to solve a problem when it has little or no bearing on the topic at hand (politics, biology, whatever). I see no reason that can't also be true within the computer field as well. Because a pretty cursory Google would have explained all the things people elsewhere in this thread have explained about how to actually do this--but he didn't do it, relied on his own previous knowledge, and it didn't really apply.
It doesn't really sound like he got himself into this situation because he struck out on his own and broke something.
It sounds like he got into this situation by calling up and trusted customer support and doing what any normal consumer does: then calling the fixup guy who is supposed to do this stuff professionally.
They said to make a backup and everything would work. He made a backup and it didn't work. From there, everything got worse.
I know that is pretty much the opposite of what I, an undoubtedly overzealous "technology guy", would try to do. Though, as a technology guy I probably would have said "Fuck it, lets install linux" not even halfway through the trouble he was having (and if it were still 2003 and the linux distro I was trying to install were Gentoo, the effort required between the two probably would have just about evened out).
Sticking with it and trying to work with customer service is a very "normal trusting consumer" thing to do.
Some friends of mine who are professionals in other fields have noted (not about me, I hope, but I know that I'm guilty of this at times as well) that "computer people" have no end of cases where they think their preexisting knowledge is enough to solve a problem when it has little or no bearing on the topic at hand (politics, biology, whatever). I see no reason that can't also be true within the computer field as well. Because a pretty cursory Google would have explained all the things people elsewhere in this thread have explained about how to actually do this--but he didn't do it, relied on his own previous knowledge, and it didn't really apply.