[lpapez]

In my case it is because I am wary of these tools breaking in a way which cannot be fixed, or services being suddenly revoked for external reasons.

Example: now that I'm a solopreneur I use JetBrains DataGrip, and overall I am very pleased with it. But I couldn't have it on my previous two jobs. One of the jobs restricted my work computer to only allow MySQL Workbench (arbitrary Powershell scripts also were allowed, of course), and the other one didn't want to pay for a licence, no matter how much I pleaded.

So before I had to make due with (admittedly) inferior tools because they were free and available as the lowest common denominator in the general workplace.

Being comfortable with the tools affects a large part of my productivity, and I'm more productive with a crappy-but-familiar toolbox than I am with the unknown spaceship.

[bayindirh]

All of the tools I use are free software and actively maintained and updated, plus they have very nice logging, so I can diagnose what's happening. I only needed to read the logs because I was young and experimenting with the parts I shouldn't and broke the thing on purpose. However, you can just create a copy of the installation directory to back it up completely.

Again, the tool I gave as an example has integrated configuration snapshots, and if something breaks I can revert to a config 2 seconds or 2 years before, including component versions installed at that time.

To be honest, I probably used that feature at most two times in the last 20 years.

Workplace restrictions something off-limits and I can't tell anything about. The people I gave examples are persons I know and they have no such restrictions in place.