Exactly this. I'm Chinese but I didn't look into Chinese cooking until recently, and here's the thing: You can cook hundreds of different Chinese cuisine, and eat them perfectly with several simple tools. It's an example of one-size-fits-all that actually works, and works really well.
Everything will be sliced and chopped with a single cleaver, from home cook to professional food carving. Wok for most of the things, from deep/stir/pan-frying, to boiling and steaming (with a small rack). Everybody knows how to coat them and make them practically non-stick. And of course the obligated chopsticks for most of the things. . What about soup? Just pick up the bowl to drink. Not like most one-size-fits-all solutions, they are not clunky at all and I rarely wanted to reach for more tools.
Funnily though, the gadget culture/marketing/consumerism didn't stop in China. A lot of families, like mine, for example, are still convinced to buy a lot of kitchen gadgets even though most of them are never used twice.