I think for me it depends on whether it is something that I kind of need and therefore I have to learn enough about it vs one that I might be considering as 1 c

I think for me it depends on whether it is something that I kind of need and therefore I have to learn enough about it vs one that I might be considering as 1 choice of many that I am not tied to. In the first instance, I try and build a simple but complete model to ensure that there aren't any gotchas. For example, I am looking at Hashicorp Vault. It does a number of things that will be useful and which all need to happen. I will spend some time, therefore, getting one example of each of those working. This will prove the docs are good, there aren't any weird limitations and it is something I can work with. If, on the other hand, I am only evaluating something, I can very easily drop it just because of some poorly maintained docs or an error in the first 5 minutes after following the installation instructions. Like another poster, I then try and keep the breadth as narrow as possible so I am not learning things I don't need, but using my experience to spot things that might need some more careful learning. For example, I quickly spotted that K8S default networking was very open so I invested more time working out options for having it more locked down.