They said the scenario in which that would be useful was IF: "It's your day to day project and you expect to be working in it for a long time". The implication being that if neither of those hold then skip to the next section.

I don't think anyone is assuming anything here. I've contracted for most of my career and this didn't seem like an outlandish statement.

Also, if you're working in a project for a month, odds are you could set up an IDE in the first few hours. Not sure how any of this rises to the level of being "bold".