I really don't think that's the case. If you ask a CEO/CTO of a startup, he would fire the guy who did the latter instead of the middle approach. Longer term stability and development velocity are very important concerns in engineering management. This is pure inexperience - it wouldn't take too long to setup for an experienced engineer anyways, they probably did it 5 times last month and have a library of knowledge and templates. I can't call a guy who isn't capable of setting up a project this way swiftly without seeing it as a problem "senior".
> The middle approach would be implementing the infrastructure
That's great if you're implementing but it doesn't really work when you're coming in to an existing infrastructure (or codebase) that other people manage.
