To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.