I think it's work either way. You either spend brain-time on memorizing the intricacies of a lot of prebuilt tools, and how / when one might apply them (modern c++) - or you dispense with the many tools, and spend your brain time on memorizing relatively few, but with more effort and detail required on their application. (C). I prefer the latter, but as you say - it's probably linked to personality to some extent, and quite "baked in".
> You either spend brain-time on memorizing the intricacies of a lot of prebuilt tools
I suppose another piece of evidence about how this is a personality thing is that I hate having to learn specialty tools. They're limiting in that typically, they only exist on certain platforms, and they often specific to certain languages, so knowing those tools often doesn't help me generally. (Libraries and the equivalent count as tools here, too.)
So I make it a point to not grow a dependency on them even when I use them. I very much prefer to focus on skills that I can leverage widely.
