You can use a wok for just about everything. Not great for baking, but anything else can be done in a wok, but even us chinese cooks (I am white, but learned to cook Chinese food) will look at you weird if you actually try to cook everything in a wok.
Woks don't have buttons! How the hell do you expect to deep fry things without any buttons!? I've seen into the back of a McDonald's before, their deep fryers have buttons and beep and shit. If a wok ever beeped at me, I wouldn't think "oh, fries are done," I'd think, "am I going insane?"
Unless you're using one as a helmet, in which case it's more of a ding than a beep, but it means it just saved your life and you should tip your blacksmith. You should also probably clean the wok before you use it to sear something and set it aside or bake cookies or anything, though.
A wok is great for searing stuff and then putting some of it aside, so that you can cook several things at once. Nothing else has ever come close to it.
But that's the limit of the wok. It's a fucking amazing device, but it's not the ultimate cooking ninja super appliance that does it all.
Ummmm wow. Wasn't aware that the 7 wok stove that I cooked on daily for a decade was just for searing things and setting them aside. I guess the chicken broth in the center wok, and all the frying of the frying wok should stop existing since a French cook is trying to tell Chinese cooks how to use their own invention.
I feel bad for people who truly can not afford good kitchen stuff, granted most people in my area can. Otherwise yeah, assuming the person were discussing can afford it. There's no going around spending a little money on good kitchenware if decent results are expected. It's not like people have to drop thousands, but a few hundred is kinda normal.
Also tip for anyone who's building up their first kitchen, those gimmicky things that are always on sale are almost always crap. Buying that stuff is worse than gambling, cause at least gambling doesn't leave you with a kitchen full of worthless clutter.
I feel bad for people who truly can not afford good kitchen stuff
Now there's a lot of people who can't.
Because kitchenware is actually hideously expensive. And even here, in France where we have access to the fundamental cooking industry tools - ok maybe slightly less-)
(Ok, I said I was in France, it's cool, feel free to downvote me now)
I find it amusing that as someone that actually spent years learning how to cook, and that I took the took the time to understand the chemistry and logic of cooking, I'm downvoted because:
I'm french (because a fair number of users are idiots, and yet I'm still here to face them)
or they believe they can cook with a microwave (a US affectation)
or maybe it's just a jest across the atlantic, since we made them a country, they hate us for some reason as a joke, haha.