Yeah forget experimentation and challenging the status quo.
airbrushing is not experimentation, its being loving lazy, it always results in really soft and poorly defined shadows, it doesn't allow for hard edges simply by its design, which are absolutely critical to achieving realistic lighting and shadows
the airbrush is an objectively bad tool, its not like we're talking about differing mediums, we're talking about different tools to manipulate a single medium
it's like using a loving toothpick as a paintbrush, it's not gonna work well no matter what you do
and a significant majority of digital artists use the airbrush so the second part of your statement is a non-sequitur