Well, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist.

(Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)

I mean, it's enough to look at French vs Spanish or other Romance language which separated just 1500 years ago. Or just look at Old English.

My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.

English: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

Reconstructing a PIE religion (as opposed to a few rather vague lexemes like "sky god") is regarded as less tenable today than in the past. The well-described features of Indo-Iranian religion are largely innovations and not found among speakers of IE branches that split off before. Some of Greek and Roman religion is actually the result of areal contact, not inheritance from earlier IE times.

You might want to read a scholarly introduction to the field (not a pop-sci one that is likely to be unreliable by definition) from recent years.

Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however persisted across the regions.

Refer to the sibling comment by drivers99. Sky god is not a vague lexeme; it is a critical rooting evidence. You're fooling no one by attempting to cover it up. A shallow dismissal of valid evidence is an attribute of a conman.

I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.

No one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.