If you can cook, you can cook in anything.
All this dicking around about the best pan material or the best knife is just blokes being blokes and obsessing about gadgets.
To be fair, in most every avenue of life, anyone who knows what they are doing can make use of lesser equipment and still produce a better product than people who obsess over better equipment.
That said - said good cook can do a HELL of a lot better, with safer results, using equipment that will last a lot longer (teflon coated pans don't last forever and are rarely handed down. better pans get handed down; teflon pans tend to get bought brand new by someone for someone), if they use better equipment.
As always, better stuff also usually equates to time saved when doing the same steps. Not always the case, sometimes things like cast-iron require a little time/prep (pre-heating), but cleanup can be simpler or whatever.
Especially with knives, more consistent results, and depending on what you are doing, possibly better at cutting things but keeping shape, versus a more ragged or sloppy cut that also drags the food around creating a mess.
In general - it's a first world problem, that's for sure. But it sure is nice to have for the above reasons.
The entire kitchen is essentially one big first world problem. You can create some of the best food items possible without using anything from the modern era. But, truly, how OFTEN do you want to do that?
Also, I'm not sold on the internal safety of chemicals like teflon or other coatings applied to cheaper cookware for non-stick purposes. Generally it stays put, yes... but it can flake off and I'm just not that interested in being a science experiment in yet another category. I ingest enough that will probably be questionable in 10 or 20 years, I'd like to minimize how often I add to that plate.