Sounds about right for an academic computer scientist, they are usually terrible software engineers.
At least that’s what I saw from the terrible coding practices my brother learned during his CS degree (and what I’ve seen from basically every other recent CS grad entering the workforce that didn’t do extensive side projects and self teaching) that I had to spend years unlearning him afterwards when we worked together on a startup idea writing lots of code.
This is a person that appears to actually think XML is great, so I wouldn’t expect them to have valid opinions on anything really lol