The author is taking the phrase too seriously. I think he has a problem with people misusing or over-using the phrase. I think don't reinvent the wheel is a great phrase when a particular action is futile with respect to a much bigger goal, and is often due to the negligence/naivety of the person who's not supposed to reinvent the wheel.
When I was working on my undergraduation project and building a chatbot, I was trying to make it smart by querying Wikipedia. I started writing a web scraper since I had no idea how else to do it (I was new to web programming at that point since I was a total C++ freak.) My prof told me, "Don't reinvent the wheel. Use the MediaWiki API or something like Beautiful Soup"
When I was working on my undergraduation project and building a chatbot, I was trying to make it smart by querying Wikipedia. I started writing a web scraper since I had no idea how else to do it (I was new to web programming at that point since I was a total C++ freak.) My prof told me, "Don't reinvent the wheel. Use the MediaWiki API or something like Beautiful Soup"