Rich Hickey when talking about Clojure language design used to point out that 'simple' is not the same as 'easy'. In fact making something simple requires a lot of hard work. That's one of the reasons why you should use professional tools if possible. Because if they're good tools the people who made them have put a lot of effort already into making them simple in the first place.
This is especially true with design. My experience in becoming a professional graphic designer before switching to code is that it is often very hard to create something that looks simple and natural/effortless. You face many iterations of doubt and frustration before you get to the point where it “just feels right” (in a direct, non-convoluted way). Eventually you become so attached to your design that it is hard to look at it through the eyes of someone who has never seen it and doesn’t share your experiences.
I believe it actually becomes harder the more experienced you get, because you anticipate the struggle and cannot really approach design from a naive perspective again, where everything just seemed a lot simpler. I sometimes see works by amateurs that I really like, because they seemed to have a simple perspective on typography and composition and never thought about it in an overly complicated way.
I don’t think many professional design tools even today are simple in the way Rich Hickey describes (I am mostly talking about Adobe software; I am not very familiar with Figma, Affinity, etc., maybe they improved). I think they are rather too twisted and complected, especially because they try to do too many things and have gained a lot of weight over the decades.
Templates and very constrained/opinionated design tools reduce selectivity/complexity and therefore a lot of uncertainty that comes with design. They make things simpler in a lot of cases where “great” design just isn’t worth the effort/time/money, because what you need is not a masterpiece, but something that just works. If they are simple enough and well made by professionals I don’t see why one shouldn’t use them.
