I've settled into a pattern of using agents for work (where throughput/results are the most important) and doing things the hard way for personal or learning projects (where the learning is more important).
My late-nineties elementary school computer class was mostly devoted to learning about and building a project in Hypercard on the school's Mac Classic fleet. The project was to build a "house" of our own design with each room being a card or collection of cards - and to allow movement between them by clicking on doors, windows, etc. like a LucasArts adventure game.
It wasn't expected that your house be based in reality, so some people went further with this than others by adding animations or hidden-object like game elements. I remember it being a lot of fun and something that seemed accessible to everyone regardless of experience with computers.
I hadn't put it together until right now, but I wonder how much that experience influenced my eventual educational and career path (among many other factors). It really was my first experience with creating something interactive on the computer, not quite programming in the way I do now but getting those same gears turning.
Under schedule pressure that's certainly true, but subsequent products will often start by taking a skeleton of a previous one. In this way tech debt could live on for many additional games unless it's addressed.