There's a difference between beinf afraid to write code and avoiding reinventing the wheel. If there's a Drupal module that gives you what you need, why would you not use it?
If you install a module for every piece of functionality soon you'll end up with a huge codebase and the hell the author is describing.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree.
Did Drupal dev for 2 years, and my biggest takeaway was: Don't go around installing custom modules for one dinky feature. Wrap it up in your own custom module.
Less dependency hell to deal with, and not only that, you'll have a much easier time debugging code you wrote yourself.