Physical/hardware DIY is significantly easier with the more (and more-specific) tools you have.
Example:
I have electronic mortise locks (historic house with very custom doors that used mortise locks, replacing doors would be ... remarkably expensive. There are two doors i replaced with non-mortise locks by filling the cavities with marine epoxy, but wife really like the look of mortise locks on the others).
There are a very small number of wireless mortise locks, all of which are garbage and look ugly to boot.
The way these are electrified is either:
1. Wireless power transfer from the strike side - this is complicated and only works sometimes.
or
2. Drilling a hole all the way sideways through the door and running a wire inside the door, using special hinges with embedded wires to transfer power through the hinge, and then connecting that all to a 24v supply somewhere.
I have the tool necessary to do #2, which will properly drill a straight hole 36 inches deep horizontally into a door with perfect alignment.
In part because the tool is as expensive as paying someone with a tool to do it for you, so i might as well own the tool.
Doing this without the tool, I imagine even with the right set of bits, you would screw it up probably 99% of the time.
Friends are also good. No need for you to own a weird tool if you can borrow if from someone else who also has done the job. (so long as you return the favor)
Going for use the tool a lot (drills, pliers etc) buy something better.
Here's the problem: the advantages of "good" tools disproportionately impact the new user. A crusty machinist with decades of experience can make high tolerance parts on a clapped out Bridgeport, because she knows all the subtle ways things can go wrong and doesn't need to rely on the tool handling those things for her.
The new user? No idea what he's doing, and if you throw cheap/poor quality tooling into the mix, now it's just that much harder to figure out if what's going wrong is the user or the tool.
None of this is to suggest that everyone should toss out their home gamer woodworking tools and replace it all with Festool, but there are some pretty serious advantages to having trustworthy tools to help you learn.
A critical factor to keep in mind: What are the implications if the tool fails?
If a failure means I will be inconvenienced and have to buy a better tool next time, sure as hell I'm starting with the cheap one.
If a failure means something expensive is getting messed up or someone's getting permanently harmed, I'm going to aim for the point on the bang-for-the-buck hockey stick right before it turns north.