I guess it's good Google hasn't succeeded in forcing people to renew certificates every 8 hours (yet)

In theory 8 hours of downtime should be fine for a CA. Obviously not ideal, but the pki system is not meant to be a live system.

Fairly sure it used to be pretty much a manual process where someone had to actually process your request for a certificate on the other side.

Yes, and it's not that long ago, or I aged really quickly.

For code signing certificates and EV certificates, (and OV certificates, if they are even alive), this is still the case.

It's been 11 years now since Lets Encrypt started with automated certs. EV certs I think died a long time ago.

That feeling when you have to suspend production service until the time lock safe can be opened.

That feeling when you finally get the timelock safe open and have to do certificate work that shatters YouTube’s connection to the account personalization systems.

The same amount of time it feels like it takes for my google functions to deploy.