> I'm saying that excusing the lack of core job skills by citing immediate time pressure is a smell. It tells me that that someone probably won't ever learn weird stuff. And in software development, people who don't learn weird stuff end up in that 50% bucket posited upthread.

Or the whole chain of work culture is bad and people do not have adequate down time or brain juice to pursue these. Additionally, how many do you want to learn? I have dealt with Makefile, then recently someone decided to introduce taskfile and then someone else wanted to use build.please and someone tried to rewrite a lot of CI pipelines using python because shell scripting is too arcane, while someone decided that CI were super slow and must be hosted on premises using their favorite system(was it now drone or whatever I forgot). Eventually, things become so many and chaotic, your brain learns to copy-paste what works and hope for the best as the tool you have spent time learning will be replaced in few months.