It's not just about "raw" speed, but also about how much mental time you spend thinking about your setup. even if you didn't know about zgrep already, that's at most minutes of thinking ahead vs. potential hours or days setting up cloud providers, big toolchains, and whatever else just to get started.
since we're throwing links around, the (tangentially related) Knuth vs. McIlroy saga comes to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15264997