To be fair, LaTeX, git, and Vim, beyond shallow use, have fairly steep learning curves and can initially seem like a huge inconvenient mess before one learns, through trial and error, enough of the basics to really unlock enough utility to justify their use.

In a perfect world we'd all first sit down with manuals/tutorials, absorb everything from the getgo, and hack away with bliss; but most people, myself included, do not have enough intrinsic interest to muster the will to sit through documentation while paying enough attention to absorb a bunch of seemingly irrelevant details about some involved tech tool, when we have one simple goal to accomplish now, so instead we piece everything together with a combination of Google searches and keyboard mashing until things work and then optimize on top of that later.

In my experience this can be one of the factors that define a so called 10x dev - the willingness and ability to plod through docs with a genuine interest before using a powerful tool. I imagine such crowd is overrepresented on HN but quite rare in the general population.