Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef, but their progress will be faster when they don't have the knife working against them.
Pick any Michelin-rated restaurant at random and visit the kitchen. You'll find plenty of $50 knives in use. It doesn't take a lot of money to build a good-enough-for-world-class-cooking knife. Once you get beyond a certain price point, it's mostly about personal preferences and "situations that apply to me but may or may not apply to you".
A better cook knows that if her knives are dull, she won’t perform as well.
That being said, I still prefer diamond stones (sharpening wise)
Tomatoes, meat, fish, I use my $4 serrated knife. Everything else is fine. With proper technique it's basically impossible to cut yourself even with a very dull knife.
You’re getting awfully literal, though.
It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago)
If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait.
I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.
A knife that won't hold it's edge will mean you are explicitly going to perform worse as a chef - you will get ragged cuts, you will be more at risk for injuring yourself, etc.
A slow laptop will mean you learn more slowly - doubly so if you are working with compiled languages or anything where you spend significant processing time before determining the outcome of whatever you're working on. The quicker you can get feedback on your work, be it from compilation errors, manual review of the output, your tests running, etc., the more you get to iterate and the more you get to learn.
A cheap soldering iron explicitly can make soldering more difficult and result in worse outcomes, particularly for a beginner.
Be it cooking, soldering, photographing, programming, whatever, there is frequently a point where going from a cheaper tool to a more expensive one will make the life of a beginner easier and let them produce better outcomes. As you get more skilled you can learn how to more quickly and easily sharpen knives, or produce fewer bugs in your code, or how to better handle aperture vs. ISO or whatever. But in those cases there will still often be productivity/efficiency gains from using nicer tools
it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand.
But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.
