It's a real pain, especially when you want a quick one-off regex. In that case the learning curve changes the economics of what the right tool is for the job. Often I'll just end up writing a program using a tool I already know, even though I'm aware that it's a less efficient choice—at least its inefficiency is predictable. Of course if you do that enough times then you've spent more than the original learning curve would have cost! I have done this in painfully many contexts. Regexes are an obvious case, probably because they're so obviously doing the same thing, just differently enough to waste your time.
Some people actually like searching for and paging through documentation to learn how, e.g., regex format X does character escaping. And they tend to remember such things, too. I don't and don't.
This is a very big issue and one I recently faced in the workplace. Needed a script to parse some log files to generate CSV reports for the business users. I knew jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) and hence was able to write less than 10 lines of jq to do it combined with some preprocessing using sed.
I then realised that NOBODY on the team knew jq apart from me and I had to rewrite it in Python which took me 4 days to do correctly and handle everything that jq did for me.
It's a real pain, especially when you want a quick one-off regex. In that case the learning curve changes the economics of what the right tool is for the job. Often I'll just end up writing a program using a tool I already know, even though I'm aware that it's a less efficient choice—at least its inefficiency is predictable. Of course if you do that enough times then you've spent more than the original learning curve would have cost! I have done this in painfully many contexts. Regexes are an obvious case, probably because they're so obviously doing the same thing, just differently enough to waste your time.
Some people actually like searching for and paging through documentation to learn how, e.g., regex format X does character escaping. And they tend to remember such things, too. I don't and don't.