If you're a principal, you should be able to keep up with modern tools. Making sure the engineers around you are as productive as possible with their current tools and processes is literally your job!

If as a principal, you are no longer able to keep up with tooling / patterns that everyone else at your company wants to use, its time to take a smaller scope or time to retire.

The job, including mandates (if any are needed) is to empower the people you work with, not to stifle them.