I don't mean this in a judgemental way. In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for. Whereas the colleague makes 50 different projects, gets comfortable with the technology and maybe hits an interesting edge case or two to talk about at their next interview, if they are lucky.
I am saying this as someone, who has tried to think about complexity and what not in my projects. But it turns out that I get a lot more mileage from practicing deployment with k3s than know what Dokku and Kamal do and how to deploy the app directly as a process.