This has always been my approach really. Use curl for basic stuff, use a full featured repl for deeper exploration. I use Ruby but same idea.
I never quite saw enough value in tools like postman. Usually either what you are doing is trivial enough for vanilla curl or complex enough to warrant reaching for a general purpose programming language.
I can relate to this. I've tried to use Postman and Insomnia in the past, but the UI is pretty complicated with a lot of domain specific terms.
Instead, I just hacked together a small Python library, called all the APIs from there, and pushed to Git. Everyone on my team understands it, I have 100% control, and no cloud needed.
I never quite saw enough value in tools like postman. Usually either what you are doing is trivial enough for vanilla curl or complex enough to warrant reaching for a general purpose programming language.