[hakfoo]

My first programming job was with a firm that never had money for paying developers, let alone tools. It was also a few years before Visual Studio Code was a serious thing. So I used "programmer's editors" -- those cute things like Notepad++ which had syntax highlighting and on some days autocomplete but no real code understanding. There was no middleware, no dependency-injection, and things like the database instance were globals. More or less, the things you needed to know were in a single file or could be inferred from a common-libraries file.

My second job, they splashed the cash for full-scale professional IDEs, and they couldn't get enough abstraction. I suspect the conveninence of "oh, the tools will let us control-click our way to that class buried on the opposite side of the filesystem" made it feasible.

I wonder if there's some sort of "defeatured" mode for IDEs which could remind people of the cognitive cost of these choices.