I once heard the advice "Consider buying gear once you're productive. Don't buy gear to become productive." Once one has the bare essentials it's very solid advice. Having a dozen well-understood parameters to play with is often more useful than a hundred poorly understood ones, which can quickly become paralyzing.

I feel like the older model of accumulating physical gear helped put some limits on how complexity grew in small studios, but that has all been upended by software. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the capabilities of the setup and what will actually result in the best creative output. Creativity often thrives within constraints, and it can paradoxically become harder to work with objectively better equipment.