I mostly agree. Parsing is as complex as the theory-heavy books make it out to be (and more as you keep going down the rabbit hole). But the necessity of that complexity is isolated to some pretty niche areas. If you've been brushing up against the limitations of straight forward parsing for a number of years and are still finding them wanting, then you might be one of the few people who need to delve deeper.
Almost everyone should just hand code a recursive descent parser and then move on with their lives. I've been a part of a few book clubs at work that tried to dig into compiler books and the same thing kept happening. People get bogged down by the parser theory and give up. One of the people even eventually left to work on cryptograph for a company doing government contracts. These people could understand complex topics, but apparently parsing theory is a bridge to far for nearly everyone.
Almost everyone should just hand code a recursive descent parser and then move on with their lives. I've been a part of a few book clubs at work that tried to dig into compiler books and the same thing kept happening. People get bogged down by the parser theory and give up. One of the people even eventually left to work on cryptograph for a company doing government contracts. These people could understand complex topics, but apparently parsing theory is a bridge to far for nearly everyone.