Wait, is it really that bad to skip the basics though? Like, why spend weeks on vanilla JS when you could be building real projects that actually work and look good? That todo app showed you could ship something functional even if the internals were a bit shaky. Honestly, the whole "you need to understand closures and prototypes first" thing feels gatekeepy to me. Frameworks exist to save us from that low-level stuff in the first place. Most devs I know learned on the job by breaking things and then patching them up later. Maybe your mentor just wanted you to feel dumb for a second.

I had a buddy back in college who shot medium format. He kept getting these weird crescent shaped marks on his film. For like eight months he thought it was a light leak or a shutter problem. Sent his camera to a repair shop twice, spent like 200 bucks. Turned out he was just popping the film slide out too fast and it was scratching the emulsion before exposure. The guy at the shop finally showed him by doing it slow and smooth. After that he even started breathing on the slide to make it come out easier. Did your film loading habit change overnight once you figured it out?