Sorry, I guess I wasn't quite clear. I didn't mean to imply that a bare setup leads to better productivity.

The point I was trying to make was that constantly playing around with your tooling (configs, plugins, etc.) leads to very marginal productivity gains at best, especially considering the significant amount of time many developers invest into it. This is based on my observations and thus purely anecdotal.

Pick the proper tools for the job at hand once, learn them. Make minor adjustments if absolutely necessary, but don't get obsessed with tweaking.

The true potentials for gains in productivity lie in many other areas IMO; organizational/social/collaboration matters in your org, actual engineering skills, and so on.