Using open source libraries is one thing, writing gratuitous articles about how you did something in X lines of code is another.

IMO, any article about how you did something in X lines of code is worthless unless you wrote every last line of code yourself. It only serves to impress people who know nothing about software. Lines of code you wrote is by no means a useful metric for evaluating complexity given the amount of library usage there is out there.

I could write articles about how I built $100M+ applications in a couple lines of code, but I have more integrity than that.

I don't think it's there to impress anyone about the author's skills, it's there to show how much open source can do. It's amazing that OP could mostly reproduce a huge software project without much effort.