I’ve found it easiest as a two step process, first removing all the vines using loppers (the kinda bolt cutter looking things), and then once that’s all been trimmed close to the ground and all the vines discarded, then using a normal shovel to uproot them.
It’s a bit of both. Infants have more neural plasticity as others have mentioned, so when using the same learning strategy babies are going to learn better. That said, adults have a lot more knowledge and experience and are able to make connections to a lot more things; so there are methods aimed at teaching adults that are more effective than methods used to teach babies.