[2zcon]

If there are multiple ways of achieving the same result (e.g. assignment) and you want to be consistent, you have to choose a subset. If there are features that time has shown to be less-than-ideal (e.g. malloc/free) you choose a subset while the language avoids removing breaking backwards-compatibility.

So when you go to another project that made different decisions, what you should do is understand the decisions. It's quite easy. And that's why it's what people do do, and it's why people are capable of contributing to projects other than their first.

If you program in C++, it's the same skill you used to learn one or more of {CMake, Makefiles, scons, bash, python} except it's easier because you already understand the programming language's model.