When I've worked on small teams we avoided complexity by hardcoding locations and using GUI management tools and all these other things that still exist - and honestly, are better today than they were in the past, when you'd also need to get yourself a rack in a datacenter to run stuff.

I think there's a big swath of people adopting fancy tools to try to solve problems they don't have and won't have for years, but I don't see that having destroyed the ability to do things the easy way.