This is a very misleading title from an article of Jeff Atwood. In reality this is part of the story of the book “Masters of Doom” (which I suggest every programmer interested in game development to read).
Jeff is quoting part of the book and explains why things have changed over the years, and why John Carmack and John Romero completely changed the game industry.
This is the conclusion of the article, and I agree with it (and that’s the reason of the title of the article).
The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet.
All you have to do is get off your butt and use them.