Man this hits home hard. My guy Dave at the shop in my town did almost the same thing to me, pulled a ratty old Daredevil out of a box and said read this before you buy anything else. I had like 3 long boxes at home and maybe read ten percent of them. I was bad about buying two copies of everything, one to keep sealed and one to "read" that I never actually opened. After that I started cracking open stuff I'd had bagged for years and found books I actually loved that I'd written off as junk. That X-Men moment your guy had is real, once you start reading you can't stop.

Something that almost never gets mentioned is how much this helps the person doing the explaining. When you talk through a bug out loud, your brain has to actually finish the thought instead of skipping ahead. I caught myself saying "and then the state updates" one time and stopped mid sentence because I realized it didn't. No tutorial forces you to hear your own bad logic. The other person doesn't even need to know React, they just need to sit there while you hear yourself. That's the part people miss when they say pairing is just two people at one keyboard.