This is why I'm an embedded engineer. I don't want to muddle through all of the 'bajillion' different frameworks, languages, etc. Need a window manager? Wrote one. Need a function not implemented in our custom graphics driver? Implemented it. Want to toy around with speeding up software bitblt? Go for it, and good luck.
Though that doesn't mean we don't use third party libraries, I just think we have far more flexibility in not using them.
Well, I don't know about you, but I suspect that my efforts to write an IDE, OS kernel, database engine, virtual machine host environment are probably going to be rather worse than the ones that already exist. So I'm quite happy to use existing ones.
Anything else, where you start having dependencies on components sourced from elsewhere then you are in this situation.
Personally, I don't really see what the problem is - looking at and using other peoples software is usually a great learning experience.