Reading code is easier than writing code, but I guess some people don't like doing that. I hesitate to call anyone stupid as they did have their non-npm thing, but still.
I think there is a rapid feedback loop of writing that makes it drug like. Reading can start w/ absolutely no understanding and leave you with very little after a fair amount of time clicking from file to file. It can feel far more frustrating off the bat.
But after some amount of time, the ease of simply reading someone else's working codebase compared to debugging/designing and reading your own becomes overwhelming.
So off the bat, writing is easy, but as soon as the amount of code you've written gets near to the complexity of what you avoided reading, you're going to wish you'd just read up a bit.
There are a lot of serious javascript nerds who defensively coded the living crap out of react (and for that matter ember, angular, etc)... starting from scratch in light of that seems quite intense. Even if I were going to embark on such a quest (let's say for pure functional programming style), I'd probably start looking at the ideas in Om (clojurescript react) before writing my own.
I think I'm biased towards not coding because laziness pays dividends later once maintenance, etc come into play.
