Exactly this. I've never seen anyone set up Salesforce themselves, I'd even go so far as to suggest that Salesforce is wilfully so opaque purely to enable a commercial ecosystem of "certified" chancers and ne'er-do-wells who you have to call every time anything goes wrong.
My experience has been different. When I worked for a travel company, it joined Salesforce. Shortly thereafter it had to hire a full-time Apex programmer to make Salesforce do all the things the Salesforce salespeople promised it would do without a programmer.