If you have experienced in racing, motocycle racing in particular, you can relate this message very well.
Trying too hard can really reduce performance or laptime, similar to run the marathon.
You have to feel very relax to get better result. And, feeling relax in death-pace or very risky situation like racing is something you need to work on overtime.
The appropriate amount of effort is the key.
I completely agree. Start with what works, rough, understand it a bit deeper develop better solutions. Any trial-error, brute force or inelegant makes more natural for practioner. I think this aligns with George Pólya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It book.
The brute force is more productive and will build better intuition when you will realize the pattern and so elegant will come.
For some rarely use server, this could be the case.
However, any frequently used servers that will always be some base configuration via ansible, dotfiles etc. that can add the base alias to the shell.
Similar, rm-safely is just a simple shell function though. you don't need to really install another specialty command, just copy over rm() function put them in your shell rc.
