I strongly disagree. It’s true that people who do not understand how to use something basic to accomplish their goals are far behind in terms of fundamentals compared to those who do, but it’s provably false that primitive tooling is superior to modern IDEs.
Even just adding NERDTree or ctags to vim dramatically improves productivity. Repeat ad nauseam and you have the modern IDE.
The advice “get rid of the toys and learn the tools” doesn’t do much other than reveal your (subjective) bias for “toys” vs “tools”.