It is a reality. Another point is that piece of code does not mean everything. When it run on an optimised platform, it will give much value. For example, a multi-core algorithm. When it is a service, that can be ensured. Also, the Library and the beneficiary application run on same memory space (normally). So the lib code can cause crashes or can hack privacy. Another thing is your secret-sauce is public now. So it can be copied or reverse engineered.
Seems like this course is for understanding how vectors are translated into rasters. I guess it is single threaded. On the other hand, with normal graphics programming, where OpenGL or Direct X with GPU hardware does these things for us, execution is parallel. With this course we will get the fundamentals strong. Still for high quality light processing, ray tracing is the king. The course is good with this aspect. But you have to unlearn everything to avoid prejudice to get accustomed with the massively parallel GPU environment. That is the faster and economic way for real-time rasterization. That is a point of caution. Or rather an aspect to consider spending time on this non parallel algorithms. If this course discusses parallel things, cpu is only multi-core, not manycore like GPU, so cannot give real-time performance. However, I am assuming everything from the course-outline!