I got into programming long before LSPs and MCPs.
The only craftsmen are the ones at the edge of the lingo tree?
To use your own analogy, as a machinist myself : I can master the concept of the lathe and bow drill without learning simulation-driven CAM, and I would be no less a machinist than the guy pressing buttons on a brand new Haas.
If you work via notepad.exe and assembly with a compiler and linker ready in the next window, fine! the work is what matters.
If you don't use language servers, you don't engage with development environments which rely on them, you need not learn them.
If you're making chips on a Monarch 60 you don't need to learn shit about CNC. If you're pushing buttons on a Haas you do.
If you're coming from a Monarch and want to try pushing buttons on the Haas on the kids are using, you need to learn how CNC works. That's your job. If you want to switch from notepad to Zed, you need to learn how language servers work.
Can you not use Zed without knowing how language servers work?
Some languages are more severe than others on this. For example, in C++ your editor is not going to be able to make efficient use of the clangd language server without intervention from the programmer to understand and configure it. On the other hand, for Python the Pyright LS will be mostly fine without additional configuration.
I only had to silence a couple of unneeded warnings specific to codebase I was working with, which took under five minutes and that only because I finally got annoyed enough. Otherwise it took zero configuration (this was Kate though, but it doesn't matter, there is no clangd-specific default config there).
If you mean that dependencies better resolve = project better be in a mostly buildable state or they complain of undefined stuff that's true.
This starts to hurt bad when the compiler producing the build is not clang. If you try to use a compile database describing C++20 module compile lines for GCC, clangd will choke badly. If you're using MSVC flags that clang-cl hasn't been taught yet, clangd falls over. If you're using CMake to produce the compile database, it will leave out synthetic targets from the database and you will see errors because clangd cannot find the interfaces described by those targets. If you're not using CMake you need to configure bear or ninja or whatever to produce a compilation database for you. Etc, etc.
[1]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/JSONCompilationDatabase.html
Every day we stray further from God.