In the same vein, previous semester in Uni, we had a team project, not something too big, just very rushed.
At one point we were to contact a tcp server with JavaScript, send a one off measage, and return the reply, as the tcp server was a backing service.
My dumbass project partner has made a new server for it, just for being in the middle, so he wouldn't have to check how to make a single tcp request using async, he fluffed it up calling it "The Middleware" like anyone was going to respect it, and it took him almost two weeks working on it.
Wish i could just take that task away from him but it was his ONE TASK, and i had many others, safe to say i had to retake that course. Which is honestly humiliating since that course barely thought me anything to begin with.
This semester the task popped up again, took me half an hour to have the gist of the task down, in 12 lines of untyped JavaScript, ~120 with JSDOC types and convenience functions, didn't take much time at all.
Imagine wasting two weeks working your ass off because you can't be arsed to learn a simple concept, I'm sure he was grooming his own ego with the AI about how smart his implementation was, it required an extra dockerfile, documentation for it, and testing was out of the question because the code was utter garbage.