Based on the examples in the article, explicitly writing a line for each CLI option seems like excessive boilerplate and verbosity that Fire manages to sidestep completely. To me, this is the principal point of using a Python library to create CLIs. Am I missing something?

Fire works with bare args, automatically supports --arg=value for constructor's arguments and provides more features like tracing and bash completion generator.

I liked fire a lot, gets kinda goofy sometimes (and it looks abnormal in exceptions). If you can use python 3 - defopt is simpler and less visually noisy on errors https://defopt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/