I indeed would not want to feel stranded with a bespoke toolkit. But I also don't think shying away from good tools is the answer. Generally I think using better tools is the way to go.

Often there are plenty of of paths open to getting a decent environment as you go:

Mostly, I rely on ansible scripts to install and configure the tools I use.

One fallback I haven't seen mentioned, that can get a lot of mileage from it: use sshfs to mount the target system locally. This allows you to use local tool & setup effectively against another machine!