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Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.
vs
"I will be completely unable to collaborate on a project because I literally don't understand the concepts on which it's based"
The only non-fluid timeliness considerations of literature are typically social in nature and casual in import. Not so, tech.
Although I did have a moment of panic when I signed up for a contract work with some OpenGL/C# work. I was hoping to talk them into C++, but I'd used C# before. Turned out to be a TypeScript project using WebGL, neither of which I'd done anything with, so I had a couple of days of panic until I realized that TypeScript was similar enough to C++ that I could get work done while learning.
(Also, if you want to learn new things, doing lots of smallish contracts is a great way to do it. You select the contracts that are doing something new but leverage some of your existing knowledge. These are not hard to find; you'll have a harder time finding something that doesn't require some learning!)