I went through a phase a few years back where I spent more time configuring my development environment than actually developing in it. New terminal emulator, custom shell prompt, obscure vim plugins, a particular way of organizing dotfiles that I rewrote three times.
The output of that period: a very elaborate setup and an important realization. The tools don’t matter as much as you want them to.
Competent developers I’ve worked with are productive in whatever environment they have. They adapt. They reach for simple tools and use them well. The ones who spend the most time on tooling are often the most resistant to getting things done under constraint.
There’s a version of tooling investment that’s healthy - understanding your tools deeply, removing genuine friction, automating things you do every single day. That’s different from tooling as procrastination. The test is simple: are you configuring your environment to solve a real problem, or because the configuration itself is more comfortable than the work?
I use a pretty vanilla setup now. It’s fine.