[hackthemack]

Like so many things in life, there are so many variables/criteria and different ways to weigh them that I do not think one can make a claim like "text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives".

What are the alternatives? I had to do a little windows shell programming when working on Chef orchestration to set up windows servers.

There was "flow" programming in WebMethods I had to work on that tried to provide a snap in place component GUI to program data transformation.

I would say that there is something limiting in all the GUI based interfaces I have had to work with. Some option you can not get to, or it is not apparent how two things can communicate with each other.

Text based options have always seem more open to inspection, and, hence, easier to reason about how it works. YMMV.