I think there are two dynamics at play: * Low-level tools come out and become robust sooner than high-level ones. It makes sense to learn them when no alternat

I think there are two dynamics at play: * Low-level tools come out and become robust sooner than high-level ones. It makes sense to learn them when no alternatives exist. Once alternatives are mature they're more effort to learn. I'm just much less fluent with an IDE than I am with the commandline, and the ubiquity of the commandline has meant I haven't been forced to learn to use the IDE well. * There's some value to shaving off levels of dependencies. An IDE sends commands to git. There's just more moving parts and more to go wrong compared to just using git. When things go wrong, you don't have to understand two levels of error messages. Even when things are right, things can be slower. git is designed with obsession for large repos. Many UI screens might not scale as well as the underlying command providing them data. In my experience most low-level people as you put it focus on the second reasoning. You don't use git in an IDE because you prefer to use Vim over an IDE, etc. But the first seems valid as well.