I'm gravitating towards trying to pick automation tools that I can replace easily, but I don't skip automating things.

Often, creating things using proper automation tools ends up being significantly faster than doing things manually, and the result is better.

If I'm setting up a proof-of-concept, I'll at the very least try to write a shell script that contains whatever it is I did to get a host set up.

If doing stuff for production, I might have one instance where I set up things manually while simultaneously writing the appropriate automation to get another instance up and running. That allows me to iterate the set-up quickly while allowing me to verify the result by recreating it from scratch using the automation I made.