My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.
You just answered yourself. They're just tools.
Everyone seems to poke on the vim vs emacs/gnome vs kde/systemd vs everyone else but it seems to me the most toxic feud in the foss world has been x11 vs wayland. People had throwed shit at it because of their own specific issues and its "slow" development pace without realizing it's a titanic endeavour and the hate and toxicity brings absolutely nothing positive to the table nor the development of Linux & FOSS in general.