We recently looked into AWS MSK (managed Kafka). Many of the crucial tasks, such as creation of topics, were more or less left as an exercise to the reader with some pretty distant dots to join.
If they'd been forced to explain how to automate all the necessary tasks in MSK, they might have had to make better tools. Or we might have given up on it sooner.
It's much more trouble to take and maintain web console screenshots than code snippes.
And as you said, it doesn't even make sense in the long run...
Taking them is the easy part.
It means I do every task the first time in the web console, where it's easy and discoverable, the second time in the web console again but I take note of the commands/RPC's, but the third->infinite times I've automated it.
I believe that's true of the AWS console, also; there's even a(few?) Chrome extensions to generate CFN and/or TF to replay console actions because the API calls are present in XHRs from the console. I often use the dev tools as a cheatsheet for what params to plug in for things, or to find out how AWS APIs relate to one another
Most things are available under alpha or beta gcloud CLI, but I couldn't find any public reference for the RPC calls.
I see this as a huge negative of AWS, personally. While the "freedom" of being able to choose whichever Infra-as-Code tool I personally prefer is nice, it's also a huge negative that there isn't one single tool that has the full backing and endorsement of AWS.
CloudFormation is the "official" tool, but it's basically a second class citizen in AWS rife with bugs and gotchas, and often lags in adding support for new AWS features. CDK is the up-and-coming "official" tool that seems like it might take the spotlight, but it's still in pre-release and because it relies on CloudFormation under the hood, it too is less than ideal.
Terraform is probably the most feature-complete and most frequently updated IaC tool, but since it's technically third party it isn't going to be included in official AWS docs/tutorials or get first party support from AWS.
Then you throw in the other stuff like the Beanstalk CLI, Copilot, SAM, Chalice, Amplify CLI... there are so many tools for creating resources in AWS that it's overwhelming when trying to decide which one to use.
Pretty much everyone moves on to one after getting introduced in AWS Console Web UI.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/lambda/inde...
I have a weird hang-up about configuring ops stuff through web interfaces. I will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid them - I want to get to the point where my deployment is controlled entirely from scripts in source control as quickly as possible, because that I can trust - I know that web interfaces will change in the future.
But unfortunately this means that most tutorials leave me frustrated. At this point I think this is more of a personal failure - I need to get over this hangup so I can actually follow the documentation that exists out there and learn to use the tools!