People can spend hours to initially set their environment up but the original post was about having it broken after a period of usage which involves spending unnecessary amount of time fixing than do what they want to do.
And that's a solved problem. First by not having a fragile setup, then doing backups to have some kind of rollback solutions. An IDE strong point is their cohesion and product support. But it's not magic and things can go haywire. It's like people coding with C or using Arch Linux vs using Java or Debian. The latter are stabler, but they're not silver bullets.