I think people are pretty good at changing an existing system that is running. Which happens to be the context of almost all professional work.
Of course if you don't focus at all on the "first principles" operational stuff, when the existing system breaks, your debugging will take a long time. But that doesn't discount that loads of people are able to get a lot of work done without having a great grasp on the incidental complexity that comes with trying to get a virtual environment up or command line things.
Of course if you don't focus at all on the "first principles" operational stuff, when the existing system breaks, your debugging will take a long time. But that doesn't discount that loads of people are able to get a lot of work done without having a great grasp on the incidental complexity that comes with trying to get a virtual environment up or command line things.