It does not read like a compliment to me. What the person seems to be saying in a rather patronizing and opaque manner is that building a game engine gives you an excuse to avoid building a game, thus framing it as an exercise in avoiding hard work or needing to be creative.

In reality however, many people whom I know who built a game engine did it for a plethora of different additional reasons:

- Learning C++, OpenGL, and other tech

- Similarly, learning a new language

- Learning how a game engine works, by building one, and perhaps a better one afterwards, or for developing skills to work on existing engines

- Just because it is fun and you get a high from it

- Building an environment tailored to how they would like to build a game, e.g. because existing engines don't cut it in that regard. Basically building your own tool(s).

- Building tools for others, so that they can build cool things, because you get satisfaction from that.

- Building a new engine because existing large engines have gone stale for some reason (an attempt at becoming the next big engine that structurally solves the tech debt problems that the status quo ones developed over time)

- Similarly, building an engine that has a new paradigm as first-class citizen, e.g. ECS

- A combination of any of these.

I had a similar mindset in the past, not understanding why anyone would like to build their own engine and not a game, because it happened very often and I was the one who liked to build games. Now I do see that there's more to it than just the product it is supposed to create. I learned that when I got into tool development, and noticing that I got a lot of satisfaction from building tools that other people can use well.