What taught me the most about this was managing my parents' home internet from a distance. If it went out, they could hardly even communicate with me to fix it. I quickly learned just how many things can go wrong with Ubiquiti wifi APs or other more advanced tools sitting there.
The final working setup: Basic ISP-provided modem/router/wifi combo, cheap near-zero-config wifi APs to reach distant rooms, entire setup on a lamp timer to cut power for 30min a day at 4AM. The thing is, that solution is decent even if you understand the more advanced stuff.
Now at work I see how many SWEs are, in a way, too smart for their own good. I keep telling them, make your solutions less galaxy-brained. No you are not making another custom DBMS-type thing just to serve a few kinds of requests from adjacent systems. If random other people can't understand it, it'll get rewritten in 2 years tops.
I'm a big fan of straight out of the box solutions. I make a point of starting projects often and from a clean slate and learning to use the tools in their default config. If defaults aren't good, change tooling. Customization is super fun but it's just another layer of complexity at the end of the day.
I love that fresh VM smell...
Every time people say that you need to first install 30 pluggins before you can use gnome I just think “uh no, you don’t. It works just fine out of the box.”
Rather than turning a bunch of preferences and habits in to hard requirements, I prefer to just go with the flow. If the gnome design team says workspaces are now horizontal instead of vertical, I just go with it instead of building a plug-in or fork to turn them vertical again.
Same with Apple products, they are designed well, so just go with it.
At some point I figured out that I spent so much time configuring everything at home, but I couldn't do the same for the other multiple computers I used at work (work machine + remoting to client's computers) and that started to grate on me.
I just gave up on customising and started using everything pretty much on the default settings. Haven't regretted it at all.
The only "custom" bits I have is a homeshick[0] setup and a Brewfile that install some basic shell tools for me on a new computer.